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New funding from Amazon Web Services, the Children’s Health Innovation Award, or Imagine Grant, will provide $7 million for cloud-based data resources for pediatric research, maternal child total health and empowering pediatric workforces and caregivers, according to an announcement made Wednesday at the AWS summit in Washington, D.C. In addition, AWS has awarded three hospitals $1 million each to children's hospitals researching and treating pediatric cancer and developing tools and applications to improve screening for rare genetic diseases. WHY IT MATTERS Pediatric medical research is limited by restricted resources and limited sample sizes, as those parents who encounter a child's rare disease diagnosis can well attest. Children with cancer and other rare diseases often follow treatment plans adapted from adult protocols. In particular, identifying genomic aspects of rare cancers requires sufficient computing power. However, most registered pediatric studies are small-scale, single-center and not funded, which slows progress in developing more effective treatments, according to AWS. Access to cloud services, like secure data repositories that manage de-identified and anonymized data and artificial intelligence engines, could help move the needle, AWS explained in a statement on its website. By empowering nonprofit institutions with data-driven insights, researchers may better understand the genetic makeup of diseases and doctors could improve patient outcomes and experiences with more personalized treatments, the cloud giant said. The $10 million initiative will support a consortium of hospitals and other institutions that use cloud computing and AI resources to accelerate research and discoveries. AWS has opened $7 million to organizations for projects that accelerate pediatric research, advance maternal-child total health or empower the pediatric workforce and caregivers. The $3 million AWS has awarded through Imagine grants will be distributed between three organizations: Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C.; Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio; and the Children’s Brain Tumor Network, located at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Nationwide is computing anonymized genomic data of pediatric cancer patients, the NCI Childhood Cancer Database, in a large study impacting pediatric cancer patients across the U.S. where researchers nationwide can access them – nearly in real-time, said AWS. "What we really want to do is make rare cancers less rare by providing this comprehensive information to those who really want to investigate for a variety of discovery-based goals,” Elaine Mardis, co-executive director of the Steve and Cindy Rasmussen Institute for Genomic Medicine in the Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, said in a statement. "What’s driving discovery, in the most immediate term, is enabled by the cloud." By leveraging AI, Children’s National Hospital is screening babies for rare genetic conditions by assessing facial features using smartphone cameras to identify subtle changes in those features shortly after birth. Researchers are testing the application on patients in 30 countries to help screen children who may not have access to a geneticist nearby, AWS said. THE LARGER TREND By 2018, 93% of hospital chief information officers were actively acquiring staff to develop HIPAA-compliant, next-generation cloud infrastructure , according to Black Book Research. Technology can better serve pediatric care , according to Dr. William Hay, Jr., chief medical officer at Astarte Medical, a precision medicine company. "Too often, people have assumed children are small adults with small problems," he told Healthcare IT News in October. "Children’s medical disorders are just as complex as those in adults, and many, probably most, set the child up – program the child – for later life complications." Children with medical complexity account for less than 1% of all U.S. kids but contribute to one-third of all pediatric healthcare costs . Their disorders require "extensive evaluations, collection and analysis of extraordinary amounts of data" to be used to prevent adverse health outcomes, Hay explained. ON THE RECORD "We're so excited by the initiative that AWS is launching because it dovetails so perfectly into our narrative that despite being a rare disease, pediatric cancers truly provide a unique proving ground for new technology because of their dependency on real-time discovery and collaborative networks," said Adam Resnick, director of the Center for Data-Driven Discovery in Biomedicine at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in the AWS statement. Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News. Email: afox@himss.org Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication. The HIMSS AI in Healthcare Forum is scheduled to take place September 5-6 in Boston. Learn more and register .

To improve data vigilance and eventually get to a place where AI can make a meaningful impact on patient care, NICUs need improved standards and clinical decision support tools to ensure the basics. Generative AI has dominated healthcare discourse this past year, and for good reason: hospitals are woefully understaffed, ill-prepared for spikes in demand for care and cannot afford to sit idle while their margins constrict. The universe of AI-enabled digital health solutions, each of which promise a way out of the darkness and into a bright new future of care, is growing by the day.  In some cases, these tools are making a marked impact on how clinicians work. They’re generating documentation, automating clerical tasks, and streamlining clinical workflow within the EHR. But none of them are perfect because EHR data is notoriously imperfect.  In healthcare settings like primary care, specialty care, and long-term care, imperfect works for now. While every generative AI technology is likely to produce at least the occasional hallucination, they’re ultimately saving clinicians in these settings more time than it takes to fix incorrect outputs. Clinicians in intensive care facilities, however, do not have the privilege of being able to accept imperfect AI.  In intensive care settings, the slightest errors can jeopardize outcomes. This is especially true for neonatal ICUs, where precise measurements and complex arithmetic for nutritional intervention are a life-sustaining part of care delivery.  The state of data quality in NICUs Consider your average NICU: care delivery is fast-paced, with nearly every clinical decision being made in real time. Those decisions are already hampered by poor data quality. While EHRs contain an abundance of clinical data, the unstructured data NICU teams need is often either buried, missing from a patient chart, or riddled with typos. The human eye can correct for many of these errors; a NICU nurse is likely to know if an extra 0 has been accidentally added to a medication dosage based on a baby’s weight and is able to account for the mistake in the moment. We cannot yet trust AI to do the same.  Poor data quality in NICUs is already fueling distrust among clinicians and creating an unruly amount of rework. It’s fueling burnout among nurses who feel morally obligated to take time—a resource of which they do not have in abundance—to double-check everything they see in a patient chart.  NICUs are simply not in a place where it would be responsible to trust AI tools in any facet of patient care—assuming those tools are built on pediatric data to begin with. As noted in a recent framework of recommendations for the safe use of pediatric data in AI research, there is a lack of pediatric data in existing AI research, leading to inappropriate generalizations made to pediatric populations from adult datasets.  Contrary to the opinion that the time is now for NICUs to embrace AI to enhance decision-making and improve patient outcomes, health systems have much more reason to practice caution by shoring up the quality of their clinical data in intensive care settings. As the old saying goes, “garbage in, garbage out.”  Prioritizing data vigilance  While the allure of generative AI is strong in the face of provider burnout, what NICUs need first and foremost in order to protect the time of their staff and the lives of the babies they care for are tools and best practices that prioritize data vigilance.  At its core, data vigilance is the complete awareness of what data you need to improve clinical decision-making and optimize the workflow, how much of that data you have and how much is missing. These are all prerequisites for impactful AI, and most NICUs in the United States have a few boxes yet to check.  A recent study, for example, sought to determine changes in resources for preterm infants at 822 NICUs in the U.S. between 2009 and 2020. The study’s results were limited by missing data on entries as simple as birth NICU level, race and ethnicity, congenital anomalies, and sex. In another study, researchers determined anywhere between 13 and 91 medication errors may happen for every 100 NICU admissions—errors that happen most frequently because data as simple as time and date were not entered.  Perhaps the most glaring sign of a lack of data vigilance within NICUs is the fact that most are grappling with “alarm fatigue.” According to a 2020 study, 87.5% of alarms from monitoring systems are false, triggered by incorrect data. The phenomenon is fueling a “boy who cried wolf” dilemma among NICU nurses, who have grown so accustomed to false alarms that response times have grown longer in the event of a real critical situation.  To improve data vigilance and eventually get to a place where AI can make a meaningful impact on patient care, NICUs need improved standards and clinical decision support tools to ensure the basics—that there aren’t missing values on critical data points like timestamps, that data capture from monitoring devices or milk tracking software is appropriately synchronized, and that data is validated in real-time to prevent clinicians from chasing information long after a patient has been transferred.  If NICU teams cannot trust the data they’re looking at on a daily basis, health systems cannot trust that there is yet a role for AI in informing the care of our most vulnerable infants. The smaller the person, the more impactful errors will be. Instilling a culture of data vigilance will ensure data is correct, complete, and quality enough for AI to make a difference in neonatal care. Tracy Warren is the CEO of Astarte Medical.

None Welcome to this week's Chutes & Ladders, our roundup of hirings, firings and retirings throughout the industry. Please submit the good news—or the bad—from your shop, and we will feature it here at the end of each week. Prime Therapeutics Ken Bodmer has been appointed as chief financial officer for Prime Therapeutics, a pharmacy benefit manager owned by 19 Blue Cross and Blue Shield health plans. The former CVS general manager and vice president of 340B services also worked six years at Accredo Health and was the senior vice president and CFO for United BioSource Corporation. “Ken is an extraordinary leader with a deep understanding of the markets we serve and brings a unique blend of financial and operational expertise coupled with a proven track record of success” said Mostafa Kamal, president and chief executive officer at Prime. “I’ve always believed the role of CFO is about much more than managing the numbers. It’s about shaping the financial strategy of the company in ways that align with our core values and mission, and Ken is the right person to do just that.” Carrot Fertility Carrot Fertility, a global fertility care platform, has named Chief Customer Officer Brooke Quinn to a new role that will have her oversee global operations, clinical solutions and marketing. She began her new position as chief operating officer this month. In a recent press release, Quinn was credited with driving the company’s recent growth and expanding services, like menopause, low testosterone and pregnancy support, to Carrot customers. Carrot also credited her with driving customer satisfaction and maintaining a near 100% customer retention rate. Quinn joined Carrot in 2021 as a senior vice president of customer success. She previously worked in sales and customer success roles for DHI Group, Dwolla and Businessolver. Carta Healthcare Former Kalderos CEO Brent Dover is back, now leading Carta Healthcare as CEO. Previously thought to have retired, Dover will now head up the IT services company that seeks to improve and make the patient journey more efficient by helping hospitals streamline workflows. Serving a year and a half at Kalderos, Dover took a three month sabbatical, according to his LinkedIn profile. He’s then listed as starting as CEO in October. Dover will work to focus on product innovation, business development and strategic partnerships. Dover previously worked for 11 years at Medicity, spent five years as president at Health Catalyst and nearly three years as CEO of Commure. > UnityPoint Health – Des Moines has named Jon Rozenfeld as market president for its Des Moines market, effective Jan. 8. > Walmart Health has recently hired Terrie Andrews as director and clinical effectiveness lead for behavioral health, virtual care and equity, according to her LinkedIn page. Angela Cosby will also join the company as vice president of operations for healthcare delivery, reports Becker’s. > Logansport Memorial Hospital, in Logansport Indiana, has announced that Vicki Byrd is retiring from her role as vice president of planning and development. > Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, based in Memphis, Tennessee, has appointed Trey Eubanks, M.D., as president of Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital. > Clarify Health, an analytics and value-based payment platform, has announced that founder Jean Drouin, M.D., will step down as CEO. Chief Commercial Officer Terry Boch has been named CEO. > LifePoint Health, a healthcare delivery network based in Tennessee, has promoted Elliot Brown to senior vice president and treasurer, Emily Serck to senior vice president of communications corporate affairs and Charles Wang to senior vice president of strategy and chief of staff. > Eskenazi Health Foundation, a leading provider of health care in central Indiana, has determined Angela White will join the foundation’s leadership team as executive vice president in August and succeed Ernie Vargo as president and CEO in January 2026. > Autonomize AI, a founding member of CancerX and an AI company helping healthcare providers, has recently named former UnitedHealth Group and Elevance Health exec Anthony Nguyen, M.D., as head of strategy and chief medical officer. > Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts has hired Denise Kvapil as chief nursing officer of the hospital and Massachusetts market. > Mass General Brigham, an integrated academic health care system, has tapped O’Neil Britton, M.D., for a new role as chief integration office and executive vice president. > Animas Surgical Hospital in Durango, Colorado has appointed Meggin Roberts as its new CEO. > CompliancePro Solutions, a subsidiary of Genezon and provider of patient privacy and security compliance software to healthcare organizations, has appointed Micki Jernigan as senior vice president of privacy and compliance. > Community Care Cooperative, an accountable care organization governed by Federally Qualified Health Centers, has announced Jenny Carney as chief operating officer. > LifeGift, a nonprofit organ procurement organization in Texas, has named Yolanda Becker, M.D., as its vice president, chief medical officer and member of the organization’s strategic governance council. > The Pediatric Physicians’ Organization at Boston Children’s Hospital has selected Margaret Fry, M.D., as the next president and CEO, succeeding Gregory Young, M.D. > Astarte Medical, a pediatric clinical intelligence company, has appointed Steven Chin, M.D., as its new chief clinical officer. > LucidHealth, a national provider of radiology and outpatient imaging services, has hired Kirsten Jones as regional vice president of imaging centers. > AMSURG, a leader in ambulatory surgery center services, has announced a new board of directors including David King, Jeff Snodgrass, Molly Joseph, Adam Hieber, Joel Day, Lisa Pollina and Leopoldo Quintas Jr. > Advocate Health CEO Eugene Woods has been appointed to the Johnson & Johnson board of directors. > Families USA, a national advocacy group for health care consumers, has named Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships Yael Lehmann as the organization’s interim executive director, effective Dec. 11. > Collective Health, an employee health benefits platform with integrated member advocacy and clinical navigation, has announced Manar Bustami will rejoin the company as vice president of strategic partnerships. Bustami was the company’s first sales hire in 2014, according to a press release. > Aledade, a network of independent primary care, has appointed former CVS vice president Rosemary Wheldon as chief product officer. > Southern Maine Health Care has selected Britt Crewse as its next regional president overseeing Main Medical Center and Southern Maine Health Care, effective January 2024.