Tag: #aws

Cloud in Healthcare: How Australia is Using AI to Transform Digital Health 

What if your next medical breakthrough isn’t a new drug or device— 
but the cloud infrastructure running quietly behind the scenes? 

Australia’s healthcare system is undergoing a quiet revolution. And at the heart of it isn’t just AI, or machine learning, or cutting-edge telehealth tools—it’s the rapid evolution and reach of cloud computing. 

From telemedicine in remote towns to real-time hospital analytics in the CBD, cloud infrastructure is no longer an IT decision. It’s a care decision. And it’s accelerating faster than most organisations are ready for. 

The Rise of Cloud in Australian Healthcare 

Cloud computing in Australian healthcare has gone from experiment to essential. 

In 2022–23, 20% of all GP services were delivered via telehealth—phone and video are now a standard part of care delivery, particularly in rural and aged care settings. 

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are evolving from static repositories to dynamic, AI-ready platforms. 

Predictive analytics is helping hospitals forecast admissions, manage resources, and reduce waiting lists. 

But with every new capability comes a challenge: integration, security, governance, and compliance. 

Cloud has shifted from a back-end technology to a strategic engine for growth and innovation. It’s becoming the backbone of modern health delivery—and the risk and compliance surface has expanded accordingly. 

AI in Action: Smarter, Faster, Fairer Care 

Australia is at the forefront of AI and ML innovations in healthcare. 

  • AI triage bots are helping assess symptoms and direct patients to appropriate care pathways. 
  • Machine learning models are predicting patient deterioration in emergency rooms. 
  • Natural language processing is accelerating clinical documentation, giving practitioners more time with patients. 
  • Computer vision is assisting radiologists in detecting anomalies more quickly and accurately. 

These use cases are not hypothetical. They are operational today—and they rely on scalable, secure cloud environments. 

However, these technologies are only as strong as the infrastructure they run on. And in healthcare, that infrastructure must meet an exceptionally high bar. 

The Privacy and Compliance Tightrope 

Healthcare cloud adoption in Australia must navigate a complex environment of privacy laws, ethical obligations, and system-wide compliance expectations. 

Technology teams supporting healthcare are not simply managing digital records—they are stewards of public trust. 

The Privacy Act 1988  and the My Health Records Act 2012  impose clear responsibilities around data sovereignty, consent, and transparency. 

The Australian Digital Health Agency maintains national standards for interoperability, access controls, and cybersecurity. 

Accreditation frameworks such as ISO/IEC 27001  and IRAP (Information Security Registered Assessors Program) are becoming mandatory in procurement processes. 

Choosing the wrong cloud partner is not just a technical oversight. It becomes a compliance issue, a reputational risk, and an ethical liability. 

Choosing the Right Cloud Partner for Healthcare in Australia 

For healthcare leaders, selecting a cloud partner in healthcare is no longer a purely operational decision—it is a strategic one. 

At a minimum, ensure your cloud solution offers: 

  • Data residency within Australia 
  • IRAP-assessed infrastructure 
  • Proven interoperability with national digital health systems 
  • Capacity to support AI and machine learning workloads 
  • Transparent security protocols, SLAs, and audit trails 

Above all, choose a partner who understands that in this sector, the goal is not disruption. The goal is safe, sustainable, patient-focused innovation. 

Final Thought 

If you’re leading technology in a healthcare organisation, the question is no longer whether cloud and AI should be adopted. 

The real question is: are we building the kind of infrastructure that can support the next decade of health innovation? 

Because in the end, this is not just about platforms and data. It is about empowering clinicians. It is about faster, more informed decisions. And ultimately, it is about improving lives—quietly, securely, and intelligently in the background. 

Let’s build that future—thoughtfully, together. 

Resources 

1. MBS Telehealth Post-Implementation Review Final Report 
https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/2024-06/mbs-review-advisory-committee-telehealth-post-implementation-review-final-report.pdf 

2. Patient Experiences in Australia 
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/health-services/patient-experiences/latest-release 

3. Australia Telehealth Market Report 2025–2034 
https://www.expertmarketresearch.com.au/reports/australia-telehealth-market 

4. Privacy Act 1988 
https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/privacy-legislation/privacy-act-1988 

5. My Health Records Act 2012 
https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2012A00184 

6. IRAP – Information Security Registered Assessors Program 
https://www.cyber.gov.au/acsc/view-all-content/programs/irap 

7. ISO/IEC 27001 – Information Security Management 
https://www.iso.org/isoiec-27001-information-security.html 

8. FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) 
https://www.hl7.org/fhir/ 

9. Real-Time AI for Patient Deterioration Prediction

Source: National Library of Medicine (PubMed)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37150397/

10. AI Chatbots in Australian Healthcare

Source: University of Melbourne, Pursuit
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/the-promise-and-peril-of-ai-chatbots-in-healthcare

11. Computer Vision in Radiology (SA Medical Imaging)

Source: Adelaide Now (News Corp Australia)
https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/artificial-intelligence-advising-on-xray-diagnoses-in-sa-medical-imaging/news-story/ae20cc4c30320354069d586ca1d23846

Foundational DevOps

Benefits of Infrastructure-as-Code and Cloud Economics

As I see customers adopt Amazon Web Services, one of the first benefits they quickly realise is the ability to create and bootstrap environments at a time that suits them. This is a great benefit that helps to: (1) manage costs; and, (2)  enable experimentation of new ideas. It appeals from both a financial perspective and an engineering perspective. With this foundational capability in hand, an organisation can build on it to gain further benefits. For example, accelerating product development to gain a competitive advantage.

Environments in Traditional Data Centres

In a traditional data centre we would typically see a dev | test | prod | dr type approach to defining non-production (development and test) and production (prod and disaster recovery) environments. The infrastructure for these environments would be purchased at a high cost. Then it would often be written down, for example over a typical 3-5 year hardware refresh cycle. Guesses would be made to estimate capacity in advance of equipment purchase, and proof-of-concept work would typically occur just-in-time of purchase. Proof-of-concept in a hardware refresh cycle might trial and prove new application architectures at that time, perhaps not to be revisited until the next refresh.

Environments in AWS Cloud

Thank goodness we’re no longer confined to traditional data centres! With Amazon Web Services, you can create infrastructure and services without paying any upfront purchase costs. You pay for what you use, when you use it. What’s more (and even better), when you are finished you can destroy the infrastructure and services you provisioned and no further costs are incurred. (Note of course I’m not suggesting you destroy your production environments here, but highlighting the lifecycle capability of provisioning environments in cloud).

TRG Talk - Cloud - The Economics of Cloud Computing

Run a proof-of-concept whenever you want! Trial adoption of database-as-a-service like Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) to reduce your database administration costs and improve service availablity! Introduce high-availability and self-healing compute infrastructure, with Amazon Elastic Load Balancing across Availability Zones and EC2 Auto Scaling!

Why Does It Matter?

Cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services have heralded changes that are nothing short of revolutionary. These changes contribute to the widely acknowledged current technological revolution – the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Globally we have seen the concept of cloud economics introduced to organisations and rapidly adopted. There’s now a more level playing field between smaller organisations and larger ones, which is accelerating innovation, disruptive ideas and products.

Underlying digital agility, innovation and productivity is IaC. Infrastructure-as-Code. IaC is a foundational capability of agile digital organisations. Using IaC you write the programming code to create your infrastructure and services. Once the code is written, the process is effectively automated.

Amazon Web Services provides CloudFormation and the Cloud Development Kit (CDK) for IaC.

Why use a human to do dumb, repetitive tasks? Automate them and boost your operational efficiency. Once you have your infrastructure code in hand, build a DevOps pipeline to manage the process of provisioning.

Foundational DevOps relies on IaC.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is an abstract network service that allows you to create a virtual network of your own. Back when first introduced in 2009, it was a revolutionary concept that enabled the creation of a network of your very own – without you needing to own any IT hardware.

IoT smart cities

At present time of writing a VPC enables you to create a network address space using any IPv4 address range, including RFC 1918 or publicly routable IP ranges. The network can be between 16 and 65,536 IPv4 addresses in size. IPv6 is also supported.

The architecture of AWS Global Infrastructure means that your VPC spans multiple Availability Zones. It spans all Availability Zones in the AWS Region. Unlike many technology infrastructure providers, every AWS Region has 3 or more Availability Zones (AZ). AZs are geographically separated locations within an AWS region, connected by redundant fast fibre-optic data links.

You can learn more about the AWS Global Network here: AWS re:Invent 2016: Amazon Global Network Overview with James Hamilton

Within your VPC, you define subnets in an Availability Zone. This means whilst your VPC spans all AZs, your subnets will not.

To manage and secure network traffic flow you use route tables. A VPC is created with a main route table. Each subnet you create must be associated with a custom route table or the main route table. The route table defines routing for your subnet, indicating how network data should flow.

To further secure your subnets, Network Access Control Lists (NACLs) can be defined. A NACL can be used to explicitly Allow or Deny network data to cross the boundary into or out of your subnet. Each subnet must be associated with a NACL – either the default NACL (provisioned when your VPC is first created) or a custom NACL.

One more security feature for capturing network traffic flows is VPC Flow Logs. This allows you to capture the traffic that flows to and from the network interfaces in your VPC or subnet.

There is much more to VPCs than this but these are the fundamentals. You can create an AWS account and create and destroy VPCs either through a management console or programmatically.

There is some further reading here exploring options to extend your data centres to include VPCs: AWS Whitepaper: Extend Your IT Infrastructure with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud