News

Conduent's Outbreak-Tracking Software Comes to AWS

• By John K. Waters
• 03/27/2020

Now available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud is a disease-surveillance and outbreak-tracking platform that could be instrumental for agencies trying to manage the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) in populations.

Conduent, a New Jersey-based business process services and solutions provider, announced the availability of its Maven platform on AWS this week. The platform was recently updated with a new module specifically designed to track and report on cases of the coronavirus.

According to Conduent, Maven is currently used by about 40 organizations, mainly in the United States, to manage cases of over 90 communicable diseases. It has been deployed to track and help contain many outbreaks, including Ebola.

In an effort to help stop the spread of COVID-19 in the United States, Conduent is waiving the software license fee for the Maven COVID-19 module through June 30, 2020 for qualified state- and territorial-level public health agencies.

"Maven on AWS will help digitize the tracing, reporting and surveying of those who have come into contact with an infected person, making it easier for public health agencies to quickly operationalize their response protocols to curtail the spread of infection and better serve communities at scale while reducing costs," said Mark Brewer, president of Conduent's Global Public Sector Solutions group, in a statement.

The rapid deployment of Maven on the secure and resilient AWS cloud provides new levels of agility and scalability, Brewer said, helping to speed up the implementation process for health organizations.

"Hosting Maven on AWS also speeds up the process for health agencies and organizations to perform contact tracing across an entire country, state, county, city or region securely and at scale," he added.

Maven taps the AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) to distribute traffic to the Maven application running on top of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The Maven COVID-19 module uses Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL as its datastore to simplify setup and reduce database management costs.

"AWS is supporting our healthcare and life sciences customers and partners, including government agencies, by enabling them to increase the rate and scale at which they're able to adopt new and existing solutions to the industry, speeding up the delivery of insight and the ability to intervene at critical care moments," said Shez Partovi, M.D., Worldwide Director of Healthcare in the AWS Life Sciences and Genomics group. "Solutions like Conduent's Maven platform provide contact tracing information that will help public health agencies to quickly respond to COVID-19, ensuring the right healthcare agencies, clinicians and patients can take effective action."

Maven is designed to support real-time analytical collaboration among health care organizations and experts, such as medical professionals and epidemiologists. As secure and ethical information sharing becomes essential in efforts to "flatten the curve" of highly contagious diseases like the coronavirus, the platform automates the integration of disparate information sources, including test results from labs and reports from the patients themselves.

For example, Maven's COVID-19 module enables digital outreach on a large scale to individuals to validate whether their symptoms could be COVID-19-related, the company explained. If a case is suspected, doctors and public health workers can take "expeditious action" while remaining free of any contact with the person.

"The insight automated by Maven provides the ability to combine provider expertise and intelligence," the company said, "enabling a consistent and organized response, and the ability to issue mandatory reports to authorities including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)."