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Amazon Web Services Releases Case Study Featuring The Center for Health Affairs’ SDoH Innovation Hub

A case study recently published by Amazon Web Services shines a light on the work of The Center for Health Affairs’ Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) Innovation Hub, including recent findings on firearm-related suicides in Cleveland.

The SDoH Innovation Hub, powered by AWS, was built to ingest data and strategize solutions. Beginning with a focus on addressing firearm-related deaths in Cleveland, the data gathering area will eventually expand to more aspects of SDoH and, eventually, more communities.

Through data analysis, The Center identified a correlation between firearm-related suicides and factors including housing insecurity, lack of transportation and unemployment. Three zip codes in Cleveland with the highest rates of firearm suicides have been identified for developing interventions.

Going forward, The Center plans to analyze data about the individuals living in these zip codes and collaborate with partner organizations to develop policies and programs that can improve the issues of housing insecurity, transportation and unemployment. The SDoH Hub will then assess the impact of these interventions on future rates of firearm-related suicides in the impacted communities.

AWS Helps The Center Identify and Address Health Disparities

Amazon’s SageMaker platform was instrumental in The Center’s creation of the SDoH Innovation Hub. Allowing for quick access to data insights, the platform provided the fully managed infrastructure, tools and workflows for building, training and deploying machine learning models.

Working together to bring advanced computing solutions to solve health equity-related challenges around the world, The Center and AWS continue to identify and address health disparities through data.

“By connecting data experts from AWS with the healthcare community through The Center, we can drive innovation and offer data-driven solutions,” said Dr. Kim Byas, SDoH Leader, The Center for Health Affairs.

Pulling data from various sources to facilitate data-driven insights, The Center’s SDoH Innovation Hub involves more than 200 organizations. In just the first 18 months of operation, the SDoH Innovation Hub accessed more than 15 million records and securely processed both structured and unstructured data.

The Future of the SDoH Innovation Hub

The Center plans to enhance the SDoH Innovation Hub, including building its own models in Amazon SageMaker and migrating data into AWS HealthLake which helps companies securely store transform, transact and analyze health data in minutes.

Committed to finding solutions for complex social and economic issues related to social determinants of health and disparities and their root causes, The Center for Health Affairs will be focusing on additional topics, such as environmental health, education and workforce development, access to healthcare, maternal and infant deaths, and more.

You can view the case study, here.