AWS Summit DC 2026 | Dr. Angela Shippy, AWS

Clips
More from AWS Summit DC 2026

Dr. Angela Shippy

Senior Physician Executive

AWS

play_circle_outline From Clinic to Cloud: Dr. Angela Shippy’s Journey to AWS and Pandemic-Driven Tech-Clinical Integration

play_circle_outline AWS Summit 2026: Scaling Trusted, Purpose-Built AI and Agentic Solutions for Secure Healthcare Transformation

play_circle_outline Health equity initiative: $90M+ support for underserved and rural communities

Info
Transcript

Dr. Angela Shippy, AWS

Dr. Angela Shippy

Senior Physician Executive AWS

In this interview from AWS Summit Washington, D.C. 2026, Angela Shippy, director and senior physician executive at Amazon Web Services, joins theCUBE + NYSE Wired's Gemma Allen to discuss how AI is accelerating healthcare innovation, from patient access and operational efficiency to drug discovery and global disease surveillance. Shippy, whose clinical career included leading pandemic incident response before joining AWS in 2021, explains why healthcare is no longer a slow adopter — 19 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies and 80% of healthcare and life scie... Read more

explore Keep Exploring

How did your background as a clinical end user of technology and your pandemic incident response work lead you to join AWS's healthcare and life sciences team? add

How do considerations like patient security, trust, and healthcare’s traditionally slower adoption of new technology influence how AWS designs services and supports healthcare and life‑sciences organizations as they adopt and scale AI? add

What is AWS doing through its Health Equity Initiative to improve access to care and support underserved, rural, and smaller communities? add

bolt Powered by CUBE AI

Dr. Angela Shippy, AWS

search

Gemma Allen

>> Welcome back to theCUBE Coverage here on the ground at AWS Summit in Washington, D.C. 2026, where we are having conversations on all things AI and this future paradigm for some of AWS customers, clients, and key ecosystem players. Joining me now is for a conversation on AI and healthcare and how we bridge the clinical realities with the technology. It's Dr. Angela Shippy, senior physician executive at AWS. Welcome Angela.

Dr. Angela Shippy

>> Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Gemma Allen

>> So you've had a fascinating career. You were a chief medical officer, you've been in the trenches, you've talked to a lot of folks on gurneys, I'm sure over the years. And now you're bringing that knowledge and using it from the perspective of the tech stack. Talk to me about why. What made you do that? Why and when?

Dr. Angela Shippy

>> Sure. So one of the things about my career is I've been an end user of technology my entire career, including when I was starting my residency, we had to start a couple of days early because we were mandated to use a very early version of computerized physician order entry or CPOE. So truly throughout my career, I've been someone who has always had to incorporate technology and I've seen the importance of it. And right before I came to AWS, I was part of an incident response team for the pandemic where, of course, we bridged technology for operational purposes with clinical purposes and we saw the power of it. So it was only a natural transition to come here to AWS to a team where we're really helping healthcare and life sciences organizations realize what they can do to reimagine care.

Gemma Allen

>> So just after the pandemic, so 2021, 2022?

Dr. Angela Shippy

>> 2021, yes.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow. If you think about the world of 2021 and the world of 2026 and the perspective of technology, I mean a hell of a lot of change in a short space of time, right?

Dr. Angela Shippy

>> I mean, it's been a huge change, truly monumental. And what we're seeing here right now at AWS, and part of the reason why we're so excited about DC Summit is we have customers who started out using technology for data, collecting information from the electronic health record, being able to bring that together. But now, we have the introduction of AI and agentic AI, and now we're seeing our customers move from doing experiments in one particular part of the organization to now really scaling, looking to accelerate innovation and looking to really change the patient experience.

Gemma Allen

>> In that world of accelerating innovation, that is a complicated ask at a very complicated time because so much is shifting so quickly in the world of tech. And I feel like there's a lot of pressure on a lot of verticals, especially healthcare to keep a pace. But we know that things move to a certain pace in healthcare for specific reasons, right? And we think about like patient security, trust being a huge one. Talk to us about how those kind of, I guess, personal and professional realities feed into some of what you create now, especially when we think about what's happening across the stock here.

Dr. Angela Shippy

>> Sure. So one of the things you'll often hear people say about healthcare, like maybe they won't be first but they won't be the last or the slower adoption curve. But right now, what I'm seeing is with this big shift in technology, I'm seeing healthcare and life sciences customers say, "I really want to go there." We have thousands of customers right now who are already using our infrastructure. We have like 19 out of 20 of the pharma companies using their AI and ML on AWS, 10 out of 10 of the medical devices. We've got 80% of the healthcare and life sciences unicorns utilizing us. And the reason they do that is, one, they can trust the infrastructure that we have. Two, we've got a managed AI layer that they can use. And the third part of it is that truly the security and the guardrails that are in place for them because of the purpose-built services and solutions that we have.

Gemma Allen

>> Angela, I think a lot about the world of mid-cap, small business, those kind of parts of society, which are so important, but you're somewhat left behind by the last technological wave, right? If we think about it, they didn't have the same tech budgets as huge enterprises, for example. So there's always an expectation that money meets the moment. We think about this moment here in right now, and we think about folks who are running hospital networks in towns across America where budgets have been stretched for a long time, but the significance of what they provide is huge. How do you think about the way in which AWS solutions help them meet the moment? It provides them a level of accessibility, it bridges a knowledge gap. Where does it really come into play?

Dr. Angela Shippy

>> Right. Well, one of the things that we have said here at AWS is where you live shouldn't dictate the kind of care that you get or what your lifespan should be. And so part of that is we're helping these smaller communities, we're helping underserved communities or even rural communities really reach out to their patient population and we've done it over the last five years with our health equity initiative. One of the things we were able to do is take 90 million plus dollars, over 600 different organizations and help them really implement new ways to either provide access to care, to analyze data, to improve access to care, and really take a look at these underserved populations. So we understand that there are different needs, different sizes and different communities and we're making the technology available to them by helping to support them through technology, either technology credits and help or through hands-on technologists to help them implement a new solution.

Gemma Allen

>> Talk me through some use cases, some customer stories. I'm specifically interested in Connected Health that was launched this year, bring that to life.

Dr. Angela Shippy

>> Sure.

Gemma Allen

>> Help us see the value.

Dr. Angela Shippy

>> Well, I'll tell you what's been really exciting about Amazon Connect Health. We've seen it utilized in a couple of our customers where they've seen real advantages to utilizing it. So at UC San Diego, we saw them touch 3.2 million patient interactions, have 33,000 decrease in hours spent by their agents. And then we saw them have a 30% reduction and even up to 60% reduction in calls that were abandoned. So in utilizing this technology, they were able to better access their patients and provide them with a better experience. I'll give you another example of how Amazon Connect Health has been really helpful. Jupiter Medical, they were able to see a $30,000 reduction in their operations. They were able to see as well 95% increased utilization and they were able to take an 1,800-hour backlog in their diagnostic area and decrease that by 60%, which meant that they went from taking two weeks to get patients in for diagnostics down to 24 hours. I mean, those are big changes that are helping patients have a better experience and better access to health.

Gemma Allen

>> When you think about where that time can be spent, it's huge, right? Especially when you think about societal health generally. So what does the deployment look like? Let's say for one of those examples, how plug and play is this? How quickly can any hospital or one of those customer stories realize the value?

Dr. Angela Shippy

>> Well, one of the things that we are saying about this new age when utilizing AI and agentic AI, it's allowing people who are not developers have the ability to really get something started. Just by saying what they want to implement, they're able to get an application started truly in minutes to hours as opposed to waiting days to weeks to implement that technology. And that's exactly what they're getting with Amazon Connect Health. It's allowing them to implement something quickly, iterate on it, make changes, and they can scale it up or down depending on how many patients they need to access, what the potential use case is for them, and how they're trying to really help their patients have a better experience.

Gemma Allen

>> Healthcare is a huge space, right? There's so many different areas and elements and customer profiles when we think about healthcare. We all think of the obvious ones, right? The ones that we know and experience, but there's like drug discovery. There's so many ways in which AI can help we hope solve for some of the problems in healthcare. Talk about some of the cases or experiences that we might not hear about every day or assume to know.

Dr. Angela Shippy

>> I think one of the things that most people don't know is how long it really takes when you think about research and development for a new drug. And so with Amazon Bio Discovery, which is one of the new solutions that we have, we're helping our customers like MSK be able to get there quicker. So they're able to go really what would take them weeks to months. They're really able to do it within hours to days, being able to accelerate that drug discovery. That's really important. What that means is that the next big drug, the next big innovation in cancer care might come along sooner and really look to save somebody's life.

Gemma Allen

>> And in your role, bridging the realities of what it's like to work at a hospital with the tech is usually important, right? We've seen and learned from use case in society where that hasn't happened, where people have built tech on assumption and it hasn't always worked out well. Healthcare, it's so important we don't take those risks. Talk to me about how you guys think about this, how you think about the kind of recursive learning on your end and continuing to kind of grow that knowledge base, that opportunity to link clinicians with the tech on an ongoing basis. What does that look like?

Dr. Angela Shippy

>> So one of the things that we do is we like to partner with our customers and collaborate together, work backwards from some of their biggest pain points. So you've heard us make an announcement about the Fleming Initiative. This is about antimicrobial resistance. This is a problem that every provider, community across the globe thinks about. Do we have infections that are now resistant to the antimicrobial therapy that's currently in place? So right now, we're looking at a problem that every 11 seconds somebody gets diagnosed with a resistant infection and every 15 seconds somebody dies from it. So this is a real problem that absolutely can kill. So right now, with the Fleming Initiative, we're looking to have one global opportunity across 150 communities in real time to be able to say, "Let's look at antimicrobial resistance. Let's be able to see where we're having the biggest opportunity and bring all of that data together in an open source so that we can get to the point where we're preventing resistant infections from happening." This means that our current medications that we have, anti-infective medications that we have will continue to be able to treat those conditions and it'll let practitioners stay ahead of where the resistance is so they're treating those patients appropriately. That's a really big deal right now that's actually making a difference in the lives of patients. That's bringing together the technology, bringing together the healthcare provider community and working together on an initiative that will really make a difference in the lives of patients.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow. So I guess to summarize, AI isn't necessarily replacing clinicians, but it's replacing a lot of the tools and resources around clinicians, right? It's replacing the opportunity or widening the opportunity that we can use to grow and learn and develop healthcare in many different directions. What's ahead for you, Angela? What does this next 12 ... I think it's hard to think beyond 12 months right now. Even six months feels like a lot. So much is happening so quickly. What are the priorities between now and even the end of the year?

Dr. Angela Shippy

>> I think the biggest priorities right now are looking at these initiatives that are happening, looking at these collaborations and partnerships and seeing as we learn from them, where can we go next? We may be focused right now on oncology or cancer care, focused right now on antimicrobial resistance, but where can we go next? Is it cardiovascular care next? We'll have to see. So learning in that way and also I think for everybody to realize this is an opportunity where the next big discovery is probably going to be made by someone who has an agent by their side. It's really leaning in and learning and using this technology to further enhance patient care and further enhance the experience that patients are having.

Gemma Allen

>> And Angela, have you were to place a bet that in your lifetime AI can solve for cancer? Do you think if the cure is out there?

Dr. Angela Shippy

>> I think that the opportunity is there and we're going to get there faster, because now we have agents that are right beside us helping us do the work.

Gemma Allen

>> Well, let's end on that hope. Dr. Angela Shippy, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE.

Dr. Angela Shippy

>> Thank you so much. Appreciate you.

Gemma Allen

>> I'm Gemma Allen here on the ground at the AWS summit in Washington, D.C. 2026. We're live with theCUBE bringing you all the conversations. Don't go anywhere.