Q&A: AWS on AI Agents and Quantum Computing in Healthcare
At the 2026 HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exposition in Las Vegas, Rowland Illing, chief medical officer at Amazon Web Services (AWS), shared insights on how AI agents, interoperability, and quantum computing are expected to reshape healthcare and life sciences in the coming years.
AI Agents to Transform Care Workflows
According to Illing, the next wave of healthcare transformation will be driven by agentic AI — intelligent AI agents that can automate routine tasks across the patient care journey. AWS is already developing AI agents through services such as Amazon Connect Health, which focuses on improving patient interactions and reducing administrative burden.
These AI agents are designed to handle lower-level administrative and operational tasks, such as patient identification, call routing, documentation, and workflow coordination. The goal is not to replace doctors, but to reduce administrative workload so healthcare professionals can focus more on patient care.
Illing emphasized that AWS sees AI as a support tool rather than a replacement for clinicians. The company believes there will always be a “human in the loop,” especially for clinical decision-making and patient interaction. However, AI could play a major role in expanding access to care in underserved areas, where automated systems may be better than no care at all.
Interoperability and Healthcare Data Strategy
Interoperability remains one of the biggest challenges in healthcare, and AWS is focusing on building the infrastructure layer that allows healthcare organizations to make their data usable and accessible.
AWS is working on transforming legacy healthcare records into standardized FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) format, which allows different healthcare systems to share and use data more easily. The company has introduced a transformation agent for AWS HealthLake to help convert legacy data into interoperable formats.
AWS is also building specialized data platforms for different types of healthcare data, including:
- AWS HealthLake for clinical text data
- AWS HealthImaging for radiology and imaging data
- AWS HealthOmics for genomic and biological data
The strategy is to separate the data layer from the application layer so healthcare organizations can build advanced analytics, AI tools, and clinical applications on top of standardized data infrastructure.
Quantum Computing and Drug Discovery
Illing also discussed the future role of quantum computing in healthcare, particularly in drug discovery and life sciences research. While quantum computing is still not widely used in production environments, AWS is actively researching its potential applications.
Quantum computing could enable massive computational power for complex biological and chemical simulations, which could significantly accelerate drug discovery, molecular modeling, and new therapy development. AWS is already working with major biopharmaceutical companies on biological foundation models and drug discovery platforms, and quantum computing is expected to play a major role in this area in the future.
According to Illing, quantum computing and AI are often discussed together, but they are different technologies. However, when combined, they could unlock entirely new capabilities in healthcare and life sciences.
The Bigger Picture
Illing said AWS’ long-term vision is to democratize access to advanced technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing so healthcare organizations, researchers, and startups can innovate faster.
He noted that once quantum computing becomes production-ready, it could lead to a wave of new healthcare and life sciences companies building solutions that are not currently possible with traditional computing.
