Amazon Web Services supports Connecting for Better Health with the 2025 IMAGINE Grant to advance data exchange in health and social care

Connecting for Better Health’s Data Exchange Framework (DxF) Community Sandbox enables simulated data exchange in a secure cloud environment, where organizations can readily identify, test, validate, and share strategies. The Community Sandbox aims to increase health and social services data quality, promote transparency among and across social and health systems, and replace laborious, point-to-point testing and troubleshooting with an always-learning, agile testing network.

Connecting for Better Health (C4BH) is a nonprofit coalition focused on advancing health and social services data sharing to improve the overall health of Californians. Through collaboration with stakeholders across the healthcare sector, C4BH advocates for policies that enhance interoperability and supports initiatives that enable seamless, high-quality care. C4BH’s mission is to ensure that California patients and care teams have the data and insights they need for better, more efficient healthcare delivery.

To support this mission, Amazon Web Services has awarded the 2024-2025 Amazon Web Services IMAGINE Grant: Go Further, Go Faster to C4BH for their DxF Community Sandbox. This grant is part of an Amazon Web Services initiative to empower nonprofit organizations using technology to address global challenges and will provide vital support to enhance health and social services data sharing efforts across healthcare and social service partners.

Amazon Web Services continues to see non-profit healthcare advocacy groups—such as C4BH—focus on data first, sharing their health and social services data into the cloud so that it becomes usable and actionable. Actionable insights allow organizations to work more efficiently, optimizing their resource allocation and maximizing their impact in the communities they serve.

The DxF Community Sandbox is a virtual environment where participants can test and optimize workflows for sharing health and social service data, ultimately driving improvements in data quality, usability, and accessibility. By using Amazon Web Services to host their DxF Community Sandbox architecture, C4BH aims to accelerate the adoption of effective DxF strategies and architecture that benefit all stakeholders in California’s healthcare ecosystem.

“Interoperability’s success hinges on ensuring that exchanged data is high-quality, actionable and balances standardization with current capabilities,” said Timi Leslie, Executive Director, C4BH. “Emerging innovations like community-focused sandboxes enable entities to safely test, design, and optimize data-sharing workflows, fostering rapid collaboration and enhancing data usability across partners.”

With this funding, C4BH will enhance the DxF Community Sandbox with new capabilities, including automated, self-serve simulation tools designed to streamline DxF Community Sandbox implementation. These improvements will reduce implementation costs, accelerate time to value and enhance data security and regulatory compliance.

The IMAGINE Grant includes $125,000 in unrestricted funding, $15,000 in Amazon Web Services Promotional Credits, and ongoing technical engagements with Amazon Web Services. As C4BH continues to scale the DxF Community Sandbox, the grant will enable the following improvements:

• Streamlining regulatory compliance and data security: By automating data flow permissions, the service will help ensure compliance with federal and state regulations, enhancing security and reducing administrative burdens for participants.
• Reducing costs and time for providers: The transition to an automated test engine will allow for self-service testing of real-world data exchange scenarios, helping providers save time and resources.
• Enhanced data visualization: Clearer, more cohesive visualizations will help participants manage and understand their data-sharing workflows, improving the overall user experience.
• Improving data quality and operability: The grant will support efforts to standardize and improve the completeness of the data exchanged within the DxF Community Sandbox, offering valuable insights to key stakeholders, including the California Health and Human Services Agency (CalHHS).
• Better data sharing agreement visibility: The platform will collect and organize additional data on participating organizations and their data-sharing relationships, offering a clearer picture of how healthcare data flows across California.

These enhancements represent a critical step forward in California’s effort to create a seamless, interoperable health and social services data exchange system that will empower healthcare and social service providers to deliver more personalized, timely, and effective care to the people they serve.

“At Amazon Web Services, we’re inspired by the nonprofit sector’s unwavering commitment to preserving the dignity and health of people and our planet,” said Allyson Fryhoff, Managing Director of Nonprofit Health at Amazon Web Services. “Our Imagine Grant winners are pioneering groundbreaking, technology-driven approaches that will amplify their mission impact and build a more equitable and compassionate world. We are thrilled to work alongside these organizations, helping them leverage the transformative capabilities of the Amazon Web Services Cloud to bring these projects to life.”

Organizations like C4BH are transforming their communities through innovative technology-driven solutions. Amazon Web Services is proud to partner with C4BH and support their mission to create a more equitable healthcare system using the power of the Amazon Web Services Cloud.

Charlie Goldstein

Charlie is an Amazon Web Services account manager supporting Pacific Northwest healthcare customers. With four years of experience in Amazon Web Services and healthcare, he specializes in cloud migrations, application development, and IT operations. Since January 2024, he has supported Connecting for Better Health's Health Equity Initiative and IMAGINE Grants, helping develop their simulated Data Exchange on Amazon Web Services. Charlie partners with healthcare organizations to optimize their IT infrastructure and achieve their strategic goals through Amazon Web Services solutions.

Jonathan Schellack

Jonathan is a senior solutions architect for healthcare at Amazon Web Services. Over the last 20 years, he has led technology teams in enterprise architecture, application development, interoperability, and IT operations at healthcare providers, healthcare payors, and financial services software companies. During that time, he built the event messaging system for a home health EHR, a physician portal used by 20,000 doctors and staff, an employer group enrollment portal, and an interoperability program using HL7 standards. He founded his own technology startup on Amazon Web Services prior to joining Amazon Web Services in 2020. Now Jonathan helps healthcare organizations use Amazon Web Services to achieve their own missions.

Timi Leslie

Timi leads Connecting for Better Health, a coalition that strives to improve data sharing infrastructure with a goal of transforming health and social outcomes. She brings more than 30 years of experience in the healthcare industry to her work advising organizations on business strategy, technology innovation, partner relations, product management and system implementation.