Building and Deploying a Cloud Environment for Hosting Custom Application Development Services Within an Academic Tertiary Center

SIGNIFICANCE: The 21st Century Cures Act (Cures Act) is designed to help accelerate medical product development and bring new innovations and advances to patients who need them faster and more efficiently. Patients can now access their health information including radiology or pathology reports in near real-time. However, a few tools exist to allow patients to interpret these findings. OBJECTIVE: To design an application that enhances patient understanding of diagnostic descriptions by translating medical reports into lay terms. As well as, building and hosting an environment for custom application development services in our academic center. METHODS: We developed a web-based application in java that utilizes open AI to translate medical reports to layman terms. Posteriorly, we deployed our application within Microsoft Azure by building a static web app resource. Subsequently, through Visual Studio Code which was connected to our GitHub account. We downloaded an extension specifically designed to work with Azure to build and deploy static apps. By doing so, we were able to set up an authentication function that only allows access within our hospital network. RESULTS: The application can successfully translate medical jargon into layman terms and the deployment in azure enabled us to implement real-time changes whenever we pushed modifications in GitHub. CONCLUSIONS: The project was a proof of concept to demonstrate the possibilities of leveraging our organization's cloud services for development and hosting purposes. This demonstration serves as an illustration of the broader potential we have for building and hosting applications that can drive development towards a more patient-focused healthcare system within our hospital. By doing so, we facilitated a playground for medical professionals to develop meaningful tools that can bridge the gap between patients understanding and diagnostic information. KEYWORDS: Web-based applications; cloud services; digital technologies.