(COLUMBUS, Ohio) – Nationwide Children’s Hospital announced today that it has been selected as a winner of the 2026 Amazon Web Services (AWS) Imagine Grant: Children’s Health Innovation Award, a grant opportunity designed to accelerate innovation to improve children’s health outcomes with the use of advanced cloud services.
The grant will support expanding Nationwide Children’s GENIUS machine learning platform, which has already cut the time to a genetic diagnosis by 50% for critically ill infants in the hospital’s Level IV neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). With this award, Nationwide Children’s will work to extend GENIUS to Level III NICUs across central Ohio and into primary care, helping clinicians recognize earlier which children may benefit from genetic testing. In addition, a new Heart Center Precision Data Lake will link genomic results with long-term cardiac outcomes, moving beyond diagnosis to understand how genetics can inform care for children with complex heart disease.
“These efforts extend our precision medicine capabilities across the patient journey, from identifying children who may benefit from genetic testing earlier to using those results to improve outcomes,” said Peter White, PhD, chief data sciences officer at Nationwide Children’s. “We greatly appreciate this award from AWS and their continued support of our genetic and genomic medicine initiatives.”
As a recipient of the Children’s Health Innovation Award, Nationwide Children’s will receive a combination of funding and AWS computing credits, along with implementation support from technical specialists. By focusing on children’s health, AWS seeks to bring more attention to a wide variety of causes and care organizations that are dedicated to helping children live longer, healthier lives, through the strategic use of cloud technology.
"This year's AWS Children's Health Innovation Award recipients are doing extraordinary work to advance how we diagnose, treat, and care for children," said Allyson Fryhoff, Managing Director, Global Healthcare and Life Sciences at AWS. "Whether it's using AI to more rapidly identify genetic conditions in newborns or connecting complex datasets to improve surgical outcomes for kids with epilepsy, these organizations are leading the charge in transforming pediatric care. At AWS, we're proud to support the innovators who are making precision medicine a reality for every child."
Since the launch of the Imagine Grant program in 2018, AWS has awarded more than $21 million in unrestricted funding, AWS cloud computing credits and technical expertise to more than 170 nonprofit organizations.