This prehospital access allows neurologists to evaluate the case and direct the ambulance to the right facility faster for better outcomes.
For 70-year-old Garry Tierney, who suffered a severe stroke near Nowra, NSW, Zeus allowed Sydney neurologists to provide medical support from over 150 miles away. Garry received clot-busting medication just 31 minutes after hospital arrival, setting a record time at the time.
In rural Australia, there are 50% fewer healthcare providers per capita compared to cities, according to the National Rural Health Alliance. This leaves rural residents at risk of shorter lifespans, higher disease rates, and limited essential services. With projected stroke cases doubling by 2050, Zeus technology provides more equitable access to timely stroke care across Australia's vast landscape, where every minute can mean the difference between life and death.
Bringing Healthcare to Remote Areas with the Cloud
Australian Stroke Alliance is addressing this inequity by enhancing healthcare accessibility across rural, regional, remote and Indigenous communities in Australia, through their Zeus mobile app for clinicians, ambulance paramedics, and allied health workers. The app leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud to provide real-time, expert neurological consultations for accurate and rapid stroke diagnoses, even in remote areas. Previously diagnosis would take many hours as patients often required imaging, neurological support and advanced stroke care from major hospitals. Often, inter-hospital transfers slowed things down despite the urgent need to treat the stroke and return the brain to full blood flow.
The Australian Stroke Alliance is supported by the AWS Health Equity Initiative and leverages AWS’s Well-Architected Framework to design and produce the solution. The Health Equity Initiative is a US$60 million commitment in cloud credits and technical expertise by AWS to advance health equity. Since the initiative’s launch in 2021, 229 organisations, including the Stroke Alliance, have contributed innovations to help address disparities in social determinants of health.
“Given the annual occurrence of 60,000 strokes and the loss of 12,000 lives across Australia, ensuring swift access to stroke care becomes a paramount imperative,” said Associate Professor Andrew Bivard, Chief Technology Officer, Australian Stroke Alliance. “In regional areas, only 35% receive stroke unit care compared to 85% in metro areas. The AWS Health Equity Initiative has given us the opportunity to make a difference in the health and lives of underserved populations.”
Zeus telehealth is being used in South Australia and Northern Territory to quickly diagnose and treat stroke patients through video consultations with neurologists at Royal Adelaide Hospital. This has improved treatment metrics and reduced hospital transfers in these regions, with South Australian telestroke service seeing over 30% of acute stroke cases receiving clot-busting drug treatment, improving door-to-needle times. From January to August 2024, 33% of clot-busting treatments were delivered in under 45 minutes, compared to only 17% in the same period last year. Providing regional access to fast stroke therapies saves lives and improves outcomes.
Stroke-Smart Ambulances
Zeus trials in New South Wales and Victoria have seen more than 60 regular vehicles in the Ambulance Victoria and NSW Ambulance fleets connected to Zeus with support from Titan Prehospital Innovation. For the first time, direct communication between paramedics and hospital neurologists has resulted in patient care before they reach hospital.
Reducing Unnecessary Hospital Transfers by 72%
Zeus technology supports rural doctors in South Australia by providing access to city-based neurologists for suspected stroke cases at regional hospitals. In the first year, this doubled the rate of life-saving thrombectomy treatment and reduced unnecessary hospital transfers by 72%. For remote areas, delays happen when patients are flown between towns before diagnosis and treatment, but with Zeus, patients receive prompt treatment at the right emergency department upon arrival.
Cloud Tech and AI Help
The Stroke Alliance’s telestroke uses a range of AWS services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud, to run the Zeus app, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a service for customers to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. This enables the Alliance to securely and safely store confidential patient data, and run data analysis to improve clinical assessments. The Alliance plans to integrate generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) into the app to personalise patient care, provide intuitive diagnostic assistance, and improve patient engagement.
Simon Elisha, chief technologist for AWS public sector in Australia and New Zealand said, “The Zeus digital telestroke app leverages the power of AWS cloud services to bring rapid and potentially life-saving stroke diagnosis to remote areas of Australia. By enabling real-time communication between paramedics and neurologists, and providing secure data storage and analysis, this innovative solution is breaking down geographic barriers to equitable healthcare access. We're proud that AWS technology plays a vital role in getting patients the right treatment at the right time, when every minute counts in stroke care. This is a powerful example of how cloud computing can transform lives and bridge the healthcare divide across our vast nation."
Next, Four companies driving industry breakthroughs with AWS.
