AWS Public Sector Blog

AWS presents cloud training pathways for public health professionals

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced Training Pathways for Public Health. These pathways are designed for public health professionals to learn more about the cloud and the AWS services that can help them on their modernization journey. Digital and cloud skills are in high demand in the public health community. To meet this need, public health agencies can upskill staff and develop a new generation of public health professionals who are equipped to work in a modern data architecture.

These training pathways include several mechanisms for public health professionals to learn more about the cloud, modern data architectures, and AWS services. These mechanisms provide public health staff with a variety of learning modalities, including on-demand online trainings, hands-on demonstrations, and multi-day customized trainings for public health teams.

For public health leaders who want to understand what the cloud can do for them, today

Public health professionals are busy. They need training that helps them understand the key concepts of a modern data architecture so they can make more informed decisions with their finite technological resources and help their staff innovate without breaking the budget. To meet this need, AWS created the ‘Art of Now for Public Health’ training pathway. This pathway includes quick videos explaining key cloud concepts, demos, and fireside-chat discussions of modern data architecture and analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) resources. It presents information that can help you become familiar with relevant hot topics in cloud computing and AWS services. It also includes real-world examples of how public health agencies have employed these solutions in their environments.

On-demand training pathways for three specific public health personas

AWS already provides training designed for information technology (IT) staff with more than 600 training modules online and many options for in-person and virtual synchronous workshops. Although public health professionals work closely with data every day, they do not need to have the same level of detailed training as IT professionals. Training Pathways for Public Health identifies the cloud concepts and AWS services needed by three public health personas, and compiles existing AWS training modules into defined pathways for each. These pathways are presented as AWS Ramp-Up Guides across three personas:

  • Applied epidemiologists use information systems, survey tools, and other mechanisms to collect qualitative and quantitative data relevant to epidemiologic studies and public health surveillance. They analyze those data with a variety of open source and licensed solutions. The Training Pathway for Applied Epidemiologists helps these professionals become familiar with key cloud concepts; the benefits of the cloud to support modern analytics, data visualization, big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence; and the AWS services available to accelerate their work.
  • Public health informaticians not only analyze data, but they also establish information systems to collect, store, and transform those data and information for use. The Training Pathway for Informaticians provides a technical deep dive into the infrastructure and governance of a modern data architecture and analytic services. This pathway is designed to empower informaticians to guide their organization’s data modernization journey so it can scale in times of emergency and be extensible to the evolving data and analytic needs of public health.
  • Bioinformaticians are the bridge between data science, informatics, and biologic sciences. These data scientists of the laboratory may be building data systems to manage genomic sequencing pipelines, or building the pipelines themselves. The Training Pathway for Bioinformaticians presents in-depth learnings on the AWS services they will likely need to build genomic sequencing pipelines and analyze those data to support public health surveillance.

Find hands-on training through Immersion Days using public health examples

Self-directed study isn’t for everyone, and some professionals may prefer to set aside a day—or a few 2-3 hour blocks of time—to immerse themselves and their team in skills building. For these folks, persona-specific Immersion Days can help. Delivered by AWS solutions architects and subject matter experts, these Immersion Days provide hands-on-keyboard opportunities to work through a public health analytic problem with a set of synthetic data similar to what you might see in your daily activities. The day is intended to present that Art of Now for Public Health training pathway—specific to the selected public health persona—and will cover some of the same key cloud concepts and services identified in the training pathways.

Get customized, multi-day trainings on cloud and specific AWS services

If you and your team want to learn more about AWS services from a team of expert solution architects and accelerate the time to becoming skilled at using these services, AWS offers multi-day, customized trainings. The AWS Training and Certification (T&C) team will work with you to understand what you want to learn. If you’re not certain of your needs, the T&C team can help you figure that out with a Learning Needs Assessment (LNA). The LNA identifies skills gaps and make recommendations based upon standard IT competencies and the Training Pathways for Public Health. The T&C team can then propose training modules, design a set of training days, and get your team up to speed on the AWS services they need to work with.

What’s next?

Public health encompasses many domains and skill sets. These training pathways can offer an evolving set of resources that will improve with input from public health professionals. If you have feedback, questions, or requests, please contact [email protected].

Get started on your training journey with these resources:

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Dr. Dawn Heisey-Grove

Dr. Dawn Heisey-Grove

Dr. Dawn Heisey-Grove is the public health analytics leader for the state and local government team at Amazon Web Services (AWS). In this role, she’s responsible for helping state and local public health agencies think creatively about how to address their analytics challenges and achieve their long-term goals. She’s spent her career finding new ways to use existing or new data to support public health surveillance and research. Before AWS, Dawn led a team at MITRE that developed a novel open-source solution that supports chronic disease surveillance through the creation of longitudinally-linked datasets sourced from clinical and non-clinical data across the community. While at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, she partnered with CDC to explore how electronic clinical quality measures could be used to generate national population-level estimates of hypertension. She also published national statistics on health IT adoption and use with a focus on rural health IT and public health data exchange. Dawn started her career as an infectious disease epidemiologist and public health informaticist at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, where she was a leader in identifying new technological solutions to automate data capture, securely share data with clinical and local public health partners, and conduct analytics for infectious disease surveillance. Dawn has published over two dozen articles in leading public health, health policy, and health informatics journals. She has a B.S. in Microbiology from University of Maryland—College Park, a MPH in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from Boston University, and a PhD in Health Outcomes Research from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Pramod Halapeti

Pramod Halapeti

Pramod Halapeti is a solution architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he provides support for customers in the health and human services industry. In this capacity, he assists clients in resolving the business challenges they face and is extremely enthusiastic about serverless technologies. Outside of his professional life, he enjoys going on road trips with his family and exploring national parks.

Venkata Kampana

Venkata Kampana

Venkata is a senior solutions architect in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Health and Human Services team and is based in Sacramento, Calif. In this role, he helps public sector customers achieve their mission objectives with well-architected solutions on AWS.