Q&A: AWS on new AI agents, quantum computing in healthcare

LAS VEGAS – Dr. Rowland Illing, chief medical officer at Amazon Web Services (AWS), sat down with MobiHealthNews at the recent 2026 HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exposition here to discuss how AI and quantum computing could unlock new capabilities in healthcare, enabling organizations to solve complex problems and innovate in ways previously unimaginable.

MobiHealthNews: Can you tell the readers about your job at Amazon Web Services?

Dr. Rowland Illing: I'm the chief medical officer of Amazon Web Services. I'm a physician by training. I originally trained in surgery, did image-guided cancer therapy, and then spent a lot of time across Europe looking at national health systems, big data and how to do healthcare more effectively.

That led me to AWS because most ... all of the AI solutions that we were deploying at a national scale were all platformed on AWS. And so that's kind of where I got to know the platform. And so I became the chief medical officer in 2020 and have had various incarnations working across international markets and the U.S. and looking at specific things like national clinical trials, data repositories and multimodal analytics.

It's very exciting now, this next wave of transformation that's taking place around agents and agentic AI. It's been a brilliant time to be part of an organization like AWS that's been democratizing access to compute, storage, networking globally and now being able to democratize access to AI and generative AI and now agentic AI is just really cool, because, again, I think it's genuinely transformational for patients, providers, tech companies, payers, the whole ecosystem and life sciences companies.

MHN: When you look at the future of healthcare, do you think there will ever be AI doctors?

Illing: The way that we're addressing it is by looking at pain points in care pathways and care journeys, and saying, what do organizations and businesses need to overcome those pain points? And so by working backward from those customer needs, that's how we came up with the five agents that comprise Amazon Connect Health.

So, we took those things that were difficult to solve for, like how do patients get recognized when they call their provider and all that kill the clipboard piece of, like, stop having to repeat themselves every time, say who they are.

We're addressing agents to all of those things, but what you're talking about is the complete end-to-end care journey performed by agents, essentially.

Our view is always that there be a human in the loop, and the aim of all of these agents is to take work away from ... take lower order work away from humans, so that human connection can be maintained, because ideally, people like seeing people and that bit is a really important part of the care experience. And if we can make the tech disappear into the background and allow better human connection, that's great.

MHN: So, it's not just about creating a whole ecosystem of doctors that are just autonomous ...

Illing: ... autonomous artificial systems that look after people. …

Now, don't get me wrong, I think there's a role that tech can play, and some of this technology can play in serving areas that are otherwise underserved. And so you can argue that care provided through agents or automated services is better than no care at all, and especially when it comes to things like understanding results and reports and humanizing the context of medical data to people. That's a really important thing that needs to happen.

MHN: I'm going to switch to interoperability. Is that something AWS is working toward for healthcare?

Illing: Interoperability is really a foundational piece of the whole healthcare ecosystem. The position we take is that we're coming in from an infrastructure perspective. So, we're saying, how can you free the data to make it accessible in order to be usable and that also includes interoperability?

So, we're building those data foundations, and again, as you know, part of the launch that we had wasn't just Amazon Connect Health; it was also a transformation agent that we launched for Amazon HealthLake.

But the transformation agent is really important because the ability to transform legacy records, legacy structures into FHIR format that can then be used for interoperability and higher-order services is really important.

Now, when it comes to interoperability generally, it's quite country-specific because it's regulatory-based about what's going on. And I think the work that's going on with the current administration in the U.S. is actually really exciting.

I think the administration currently is driving really, really hard, and they're basically doing that through FHIR APIs, and so the importance of FHIR can't be understated because everything is going to be in FHIR format.

So, what we want to do is basically make the data usable and essentially separate the solutions layer from the data layer. So that's why we created the services for data types – AWS HealthLake for text data, AWS HealthImaging for imaging data types (radiology and pathology) and AWS HealthOmics for the omic data – because if organizations can really think about their data strategy and think about the way they're organizing their data, they can do all kinds of things with it.

MHN: What do you think about quantum computing?

Illing: Now, that's a fascinating question. So, quantum computing is going to, I think, it is going to be fascinating, both for healthcare and for life sciences, because essentially everyone's talking about ... there's a lot of conflation between AI and quantum because they are two very amazing things that are happening simultaneously.

MHN: But they're different.

Illing: They're very separate. But a lot of people conflate them because it's happening at the same time. I think just the fundamental change in infrastructure that quantum will bring is super interesting.

At AWS, we have a quantum group within AWS.

So, the bracket group is working with Caltech.

But that's a personal area of interest of mine. So, working out use cases for where quantum will have an impact is a thing that is currently ongoing because the tech itself is not mature enough to be in production, but it won't be long before it is in production, and the ability to do massive compute at scale to answer questions around drug discovery and new molecules.

We're doing a whole bunch of things around biological foundation models with our biopharma partners. Nineteen of the top 20 global biopharmaceutical companies are platformed on AWS, and so we're working with them on their drug discovery platforms.

I think that's where quantum is going to have a massive impact on that whole life cycle of discovery as a first use case. But then there will be a whole new, like any new technology, it's going to unlock a whole bunch of capability, which people don't even realize at the moment that it is going to be useful for. So, when it comes into production, I think we are going to see an explosion of new companies that are going to be building out using AWS quantum tech to solve things that our customers haven't even dreamed of yet.