Amazon Web Services IMAGINE Grant for Nonprofits to Help ASCP to Significantly Enhance Technology to Improve Patient Care

ASCP has been selected as a winner of the 2024 Amazon Web Services (AWS) IMAGINE Grant, which will accelerate the Society’s mission of using cloud technology in an innovative way. The grant, awarded to nonprofit organizations who are using technology to solve the world’s most pressing challenges, will help ASCP build a data lake and enhance its analytics capabilities to strengthen data governance, generate actionable insights, and support advanced analytics. 

By increasing the visibility and accessibility of its data, ASCP aims to accelerate decision-making processes that will improve patient care worldwide. 

ASCP was named a winner in the Momentum to Modernize category, which recognizes foundational technology projects. ASCP will receive up to $50,000 in unrestricted funding, up to $30,000 in AWS Promotional Credits, and project implementation support. Proposals were judged on several factors including the innovative and unique nature of the project, impact on mission-critical goals, and clearly defined outcomes and milestones.  

“Effective data governance is not just about compliance — it’s about creating a foundation for trust. By securing our data, standardizing practices, and enhancing quality, we empower our team members to make informed decisions that drive better outcomes for the organization, our partners, and patients alike,” says Dr. Ali Brown, Chief Medical Officer for ASCP. 

“In today’s data-driven world, actionable insights are the cornerstone of innovation. By leveraging advanced analytics, we can uncover trends and deliver actionable insights that will optimize laboratory operations,” says Dr. Sachin Gupta, Scientific Director of ASCP’s Center for Quality and Patient Safety. 

The AWS IMAGINE Grant will help expand two ASCP initiatives: 

Currently, data resides in four separate legacy systems (older systems still in use even though newer alternatives are available), and a cross-platform analysis is cumbersome, manual, and time-consuming. On-demand, near-time assembled 360-views are necessary to meet the needs of our business/organization. The process ASCP envisions will ensure secure and consistent consumption from legacy platform feeds and transform it into a 360-view analysis via the data lake. 

NPQR (National Pathology Quality Registry) is a quality and benchmarking platform that promotes best practices in laboratory medicine and ensures excellence in patient care, providing customers access to aggregated and comparative insights (laboratory operations, test utilization, and patient results). Pathologists, laboratory professionals and administrative laboratory leaders understand that patient care is improved by leveraging benchmarking and quality performance measures. The challenge is to scale it up, and capacity is needed to ingest and absorb data from newly onboarded laboratories with efficiency. Innovative solutions will help streamline the processes for data ingestion, data transformation, and analysis of data. 

“With the AWS Momentum to Modernize Award, we’ll be able to build a data lake — storing vast amounts of information in a secure, unified, and scalable platform that transforms raw data into actionable insights — this is necessary to enable advanced analytics,” says Dr. Brown.