“One of the main factors of the digital transformation in the medical field is the cloud. Many thought that the coronavirus (Covid-19) vaccines would arrive much later, but this is yet another example of how computing power and data convergence has allowed vaccine developers to get to the stage where they were able to produce the vaccines very quickly. This is due to cloud technology and its unlimited power,” said Roi Hermoni, ATU Lead at Microsoft-Israel during a Calcalist panel at a conference titled “How to succeed during a transitional period.”

According to Hermoni, health organizations are now focused on three main fields: the first is the relationship with the patient, providing a dynamic platform that allows a 360 degree view of the patient’s condition and is a main building block in digital health; the second is communication between medical teams that allows a continuation of treatment without having things falling through the cracks, with all the personal data being stored in a secure and documented way; and the last is making use of the compiled data in a much sophisticated way.

Dr. Ravit Geva, who manages the Oncology Research Unit at Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center said that technological developments are especially important during the coronavirus period, and that medical teams are overcoming their fear of technology. “We always had the ability to communicate with patients remotely instead of in the hospital, but during the pandemic we learned to use that technology well,” Geva said.

According to her, now that meetings are held remotely, medical teams are meeting more often, which allows them to collaborate with more people. “Today we are talking about how we can collaborate with other hospitals and have medical debates over quality care, and extend that to include debates with professionals overseas as well,” she said. Geva noted that aside from the technological advancements of digital consultations with patients there has also been an increase in the level of personal care. “Patients who for many years had grown accustomed to coming to the hospital are now being treated in their own personal space, where they’re comfortable, and feel relaxed. Suddenly, meeting with patients has become more intimate,” she said.

Co-founder and VP of R&D at Aidoc, Guy Reiner, said that the field they operate in — Radiology, had suffered from an overabundance of data prior to the pandemic without enough radiologists to process the large amounts of medical scans.

“Before the pandemic, this was a field where people knew how to work remotely but the main problem was that there was too much existing data, and this is where our product shines – it’s a system that automatically filters through 80% of a hospital’s CT scans, prioritizes them, and alerts doctors. If we know how to bring data and make it accessible for doctors at exactly the right times, it increases the quality of medical care that the patient receives, and allows doctors to focus on more important things to make them even more efficient,” Reiner said.

ChatOps has become a pillar of DevOps in recent years. To that end, AWSAWS has juiced up its DevOps capabilities with a managed service that integrates a chatbot with Slack and the Amazon Chime communications platform. has rolled out a managed chatbot service that integrates with Slack and Chime.

The move ties into the ChatOps trend where DevOps team members use chat tools to talk to each other and receive system notifications. Chat rooms and channels foster better collaboration and transparency, according to ChatOps adherents.

AWS Chatbot, now in beta, is a fully managed service that works with Slack and Amazon Chime to deliver notifications and support commands against certain AWS services. It is enabled by Amazon Simple Notification Service which serves as the integration bridge between the bot and other AWS services, the company said in a blog post.

Many customers may already use SNS notifications, but send them as emails. AWS Chatbot redirects those emails to chat rooms, and customers only need to add the topics to Slack or Chime chat clients in most cases, according to a documentation page.

Initially AWS Chatbot supports Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Health, AWS Budgets, AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty and AWS CloudFormation. This grouping comes as little surprise, given its broad relevance across development and operations teams with AWS DevOps strategies.

Early customer Revcontent, which offers a digital content marketing platform, benefited from AWS Chatbot when it raised an alert on problems with a load balancer, and helped the company avoid an outage, it said in a statement.

The trend toward ChatOps stems back several years. DevOps teams have used it for several purposes, such as knowledge management, task automation and incident management.

Many DevOps teams build their own bots and integrate them with the likes of Slack and Microsoft Teams. Microsoft offers Azure Bot Service and Bot Framework as one way to do this, while Google Cloud has Dialogflow.

At present, AWS Chatbot’s functionality is somewhat limited, given its focus on one-way notifications rather than more interactive conversations, particularly ones that would allow users to take direct actions with AWS services. It also lacks a prebuilt integration with Teams, which some may see as a significant functional gap. Microsoft recently claimed it has 13 million daily users for Teams, compared to the 10 million Slack reported earlier this year.

Still, it drew praise from one AWS user and consultant.

“[AWS’ Chatbot] beats rolling your own, which is a fun nerdy side project, but many teams don’t have the time,” said Ryan Marsh, a DevOps coach at consultancy TheStack.io in Houston. “Hopefully this is a sign of AWS prioritizing developer experience.”

AWS sought to do just that with the Cloud Development Kit, which gives developers the ability to define infrastructure-as-code with familiar programming languages, rather than declarative JSON and XML files, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said in a previous interview with TechTarget.

“We see customers building more and more complex and larger applications using only serverless components, and we’re learning from that,” Vogels added.