Baxter International Inc. , a global medical products company, is accelerating its companywide digital transformation across three strategic areas – developing new digital health solutions to personalize and improve patient care; creating seamless experiences for healthcare customers and patients; and modernizing technology capabilities and business processes to deliver data and insights to employees and customers. The company is working with Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) to enable cloud technology solutions to drive its digital transformation forward.

“Our digital transformation will help us advance our mission to save and sustain lives while delivering value to our patients, clinicians, customers and employees,” said Andy Frye, Baxter’s senior vice president, Asia Pacific, and executive sponsor of the company’s digital transformation. “Our goals are ambitious, and we are collaborating with digital leaders like AWS to reach our goals at speed and scale that will transform Baxter into a company driven by data and insights.”

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As part of the companywide effort, Baxter extended its multi-year strategic agreement with AWS to further drive the company’s use of the cloud as a foundational element of its technology infrastructure. For the past several years, the companies have been working together to move Baxter’s physical data centers to the cloud, work which is now nearly complete. Enabling a secure cloud-based foundation has helped modernize many of the company’s platforms and applications, which serve patients, clinicians, customers and employees. When compared to operating physical data centers, the transition to the cloud has delivered several benefits to Baxter, including increased speed to market for new tools and solutions; the ability to quickly expand technology solutions to new geographies; and significant cost savings.

“Baxter is using AWS’s broad and deep portfolio of cloud services to deliver new insights and digital health solutions for the millions of patients and caregivers that use their leading portfolio of medical products,” said Greg Pearson, vice president, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. “Baxter’s digital transformation is helping the company unlock the potential of healthcare data and develop a more personalized approach to care, using the unmatched reliability and proven security of one of the world’s leading cloud providers. We look forward to continuing our work with Baxter as the company transforms itself in the cloud, helping drive improved outcomes for patients and new tools for caregivers that improve the quality of care.”

Digital Health Solutions

Baxter’s cloud infrastructure is foundational to expanding the company’s portfolio of digital health solutions, which span high and low acuity care settings, including home dialysis. The company’s leading Sharesource remote patient management platform allows healthcare professionals to securely and compliantly monitor their patients’ home dialysis treatments, and then remotely adjust therapy without the need for patients to make unplanned visits to the clinic. Sharesource is powered by AWS, which enables Baxter to support daily treatments at scale while also expanding the platform to include new analytics capabilities, among other enhancements. Sharesource is the most widely adopted home dialysis digital health solution, supporting nearly 46% of home dialysis patients in more than 70 countries. Sharesource has been used to manage more than 28 million treatments to date.

The cloud transformation is also supporting Baxter’s DoseEdge Pharmacy Workflow Manager, an innovative software solution that reduces preventable medication errors from dose preparation in the pharmacy to delivery at the patient’s bedside. DoseEdge seamlessly integrates with a hospital’s pharmacy information system to automate the process of routing, preparing, inspecting, tracking, and reporting on IV and oral liquid doses. While the technology is already used in more than 500 hospitals across the U.S., Baxter’s cloud transformation creates an opportunity for accelerated expansion into new markets, while meeting local data security and privacy requirements.

“Baxter’s focus on becoming a cloud-driven company is a powerful example of the value of our transformation, from accelerating therapies for patients and enabling safe, quality hospital care to empowering employees with data and insights to drive our business forward. We are proud of our progress with AWS to make this vision a reality,” said Talvis Love, chief information officer, Baxter.

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Supply Chain Resilience

The pandemic created new challenges for healthcare facilities and global supply chains, from unexpected demand for certain medical products to disruption of raw materials and component availability. Baxter’s cloud infrastructure has enabled the company to proactively, securely and efficiently manage its global supply chain amidst significant uncertainty. Early in the pandemic, rates of acute kidney injury (AKI) among critically-ill COVID-19 patients increased dramatically, leading to higher demand for Baxter’s continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT) products used to treat the condition. AKI is when the kidneys suddenly stop working and/or cytokine storms develop, which occur when high levels of the inflammatory mediators circulate in the blood as an intense immune reaction to the virus.

Baxter’s supply chain team used a suite of cloud-based data and analytics tools in daily simulations and scenario planning to proactively manage and adapt to each new development. This allowed Baxter to activate every possible solution, from maximizing manufacturing capacity in multiple locations to accelerating shipping times. The company also built a complex data model to help validate which hospitals were caring for the highest volumes of critically-ill patients. This model helped the company allocate product based on patient need. Ultimately, Baxter’s digital infrastructure helped its teams deliver more life-sustaining products to customers when they needed them most.

Employee Digital Training

Looking ahead, the company continues investing in upskilling its global workforce through robust digital learning programs focused on helping employees build digital skills and knowledge that can be harnessed to scale up digital transformation projects across the company’s operations. Beyond this, more than 200 Baxter employees have at least one AWS certification, enabling the company to accelerate innovation and efficiently align to ever changing healthcare and patient needs.

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