Amazon fuels Harvard hospital's machine learning research program – GeekWire

Amazon thinks the cloud can make hospitals run better. The company's Amazon Web Services unit is sponsoring a program at Harvard's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) that applies machine learning to improve hospital efficiency. The initiative will focus on clinical care, operations and waste reduction, which Amazon said will ultimately improve patient care. The Amazon grant will supply as much as $2 million to machine learning research, Bloomberg reported. "Every minute spent on cumbersome clerical tasks and management adds up to millions in lost productivity and directly impacts patient care," Dr. John Halamka, executive director of the Health Technology Exploration Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said in a statement.