Access to technology, especially infrastructure, is one of the greatest drivers of innovation. For this reason, it’s exciting whenever AWS expands to a new region, because it means that our customers have more access to reliable, scalable, and secure cloud services. A little over a week ago, we launched the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region, and now you can start building with the new AWS Europe (Spain) Region.

If we go all the way back to 2007, AWS was the first cloud service provider in Europe. There was one AWS Region in Ireland: eu-west-1. There was one service: S3. Since then, we have launched an additional 8 Regions in Europe with 24 Availability Zones, giving AWS customers access to more than 200 services like EC2, Lambda, Greengrass, and Snowball. In total, this brings us to 29 Regions with 93 Availability Zones across the globe.

Our goal has always been to provide businesses of all sizes with the tools that they need to solve the world’s hardest problems, and one industry where I’m starting to see cloud technologies make a significant impact is in healthcare. Many of you may not know this, but before working in technology, I was a radiologist. I remember how things used to be—how hard and expensive it was to collect, store, and analyze patient data. So, it’s inspiring to see how companies like Barcelona-based HumanITcare are leveraging the cloud to improve the healthcare experience for both medical professionals and patients.

A problem that many doctors face is that they lose track of how their patients are doing as soon as they leave the clinic. To get more information and collect more data means another office visit, which costs everyone time and money, and puts additional strain on an already overburdened system.

HumanITcare has built a connected health solution, which is an event-driven monitoring and analytics platform on AWS that provides healthcare professionals with real-time patient data collected from wearables, at-home medical devices, and third-party fitness applications. Equipped with a constant stream of data, doctors can more easily observe a patient’s condition over time, and even use deep learning models to predict patient outcomes. And all of this can happen without an in-person visit.

This technology has the potential to improve the quality of life not only for patients with respiratory, cardiac, oncological, or chronic diseases, but for anyone seeking preventative care. HumanITcare estimates that their platform can reduce emergency visits by up to 33% and reduce the risk of re-admission by nearly 40%.

With the AWS Europe (Spain) Region, customers like HumanITcare have a Region closer to their customers, where they have new opportunities to invent, modernize, and scale. I can’t wait to see what new levels of creativity and innovation are ignited throughout this Region.

Now, go build!