Amazon's efforts to work its way into the NZ healthcare system
Amazon's efforts to work its way into the NZ healthcare system
US tech giant Amazon has worked its way into a prime position in a massive digital overhaul of stressed IT systems by Te Whatu Ora.
"I just paid for a knee replacement, why am I getting more ads for them"
Cloud based platforms that can be developed quickly are all the rage these days. I'm not really surprised by this. Most cloud based platforms will be on Azure or AWS, I'd expect.
Given the number of government organisations doing massive system changes, it would be nice to have centralised it and done it inhouse. But in general, each project is pitched independently and the cheapest feasible options always end up being on some existing cloud platform.
AWS replied by email: "We are looking forward to this as a 'think big' session about the exciting transformational opportunity that lies ahead for New Zealand's health system
Facepalm.
"Think Big" was the name of the failed economic policies of PM Rob Muldoon in the early 1980s.
This seems like a bit of scaremongering.
Cloudy deployments are cheap to get started. No-one has to wait for a couple a data centers be built... followed by all the hard work with hardware and infrastructure.
There are only a handful of providers with the scale to do cloud efficiently.
So, start there, chop, change, experiment, once you have something stable and functional... start looking at repatriation.
Of course having something like GDPR would help keep all that data safer.
However, the lobbying activity of Amazon should be looked at harder. That's the smelly bit of the situation.
I think I agree with you. I don't see how it's different than other big data companies vying for contracts. I'm sure Google and Microsoft would have also tried to get involved. Not to mention the scale of the amount of data this is and that most of them will be familiar with patient data retention and privacy laws, similar to HIPAA in the US.
The papers released under the OIA showed health's "technical debt" included 4000 competing or obsolete IT applications, and ageing clinical and non-clinical data systems.
Should give you and idea of the size of a job like this. Do we have any locally owned cloud/datacenter companies sizeable enough to manage this and provide the same kind of redundancy that AWS/Azure can give?