Amazon Web Services Case Study: Zoetis

As a leading animal health company, Zoetis Inc. (Zoetis) is offering clients premium medicines, vaccines, and diagnostic products, supplemented by biological devices, genetic testing, and precision animal husbandry. Currently, Zoetis’ business covers eight core animals—cattle, fish, poultry, sheep, pigs, cats, dogs and horses. Zoetis has over 11,000 employees in 29 production sites across the world. Having engaged in animal health industry for more than 65 years, Zoetis serves veterinarians, livestock producers, and people who raise and care for farm and companion animals in over 100 countries.

As Zoetis’ strategic diagnostic business, Vetscan has been committed to delivering state-of-the -art diagnostic products and first-rate services to China’s veterinarians. Its product line includes biochemical analyzer, five-category blood cell analyzer, urine chemistry analyzer, urine sediment analyzer, i-STAT1 blood gas analyzer, and blood glucose meter. IMAGYST, an AI-powered detector launched in China in 2022, is Vetscan’s another heavyweight product.

In the recent burgeoning, increasingly competitive pet healthcare market, accurate diagnosis is undoubtedly a critical advantage. And technology, as a key variable, will greatly improve the level of accurate diagnosis in pet healthcare industry. As a global pioneer in animal health industry, Zoetis hopes to complete digital transformation through technological and business innovations while providing better services for veterinarians, accelerating the development of pet healthcare industry, and facilitating more accurate, efficient pet diagnosis and treatment with more intelligent products and services.

IMAGYST, the world’s first AI-powered multi-functional detector available in Chinese market, will quickly improve the accurate diagnosis in multiple therapy areas, free up manual labor, fast deliver test results, and boost hospitals’ competitiveness and pet owners’ experiences. Before IMAGYST’s launch to market, the market and veterinarians had invested much hope in the product’s new experience. After taking part in the product test, most veterinarians, convinced by the product’s accuracy and changing their wait-and-see attribute, began to recognize and recommend the product. All this is supported by a suite of intelligent technologies featuring combination of hardware and software infrastructures and of the cloud and the terminal.

“In collaboration with Amazon Web Services, Zoetis can provide cloud service support for IMAGYST using Amazon Web Services’ mature, stable products and services, enabling veterinarians in China to meet the widely-held expectations for more accurate, faster, and more thorough diagnosis in the veterinary monitoring market.” said Esther, director of pet marketing, Zoetis Greater China.

First, the pet healthcare industry needs to achieve advanced technology-powered digital transformation to find potential growth opportunities.

As the pet healthcare consumer market is expanding, cases of canine and feline diseases are becoming numerous, complex, and intractable, and pet owners’ needs are also increasingly diverse. The traditional diagnosis and treatment is beset by either technical hurdles or the lack of professionals. Considering the current market situation, Zoetis has carried out business innovation by using cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), big data and other emerging technologies, and developed the first AI-powered multi-functional detector in the veterinary industry. In the runup to entry to the Chinese market, Zoetis, after in-depth discussion with Amazon Web Services’ expert team, completed the local deployment in Amazon Web Services China in record time. The team’s professional services were highly regarded by Zoetis’ teams in both China and the United States.

Second, the pet healthcare organizations need to improve automation to improve business flexibility.

Facing a fast-developing market and diversified needs, China’s pet healthcare industry has reached a new inflection point, requiring healthcare organizations to strengthen business automation by using IoT devices to reduce human resource costs. In addition, to ensure more flexible business, these organizations also need to migrate their business to the cloud as much as possible. With Amazon IoT Greengrass, Zoetis can deploy IoT applications on its detection devices, generate local data by programming the devices, perform prediction, filtering and aggregation using machine learning (ML) models, and finally transfer the required information to the cloud, thus enhancing business flexibility.

Third, the pet healthcare industry needs to provide intelligence-based value-added services to optimize user experiences.

As technology is rapidly advancing, the pet healthcare industry has imposed a higher requirement on the intelligent level of devices. Using AI/ML and other means for disease prevention, diagnosis and management can further optimize the healthcare experiences for pets, pet owners, and medical organizations. Amazon SageMaker, through its fully-managed infrastructure, tools and workflows, deploys ML models for IMAGYST. Moreover, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) can set up, operate, and scale databases for pet disease diagnosis in the cloud. ML models can, using data from the databases, build, train, deploy, manage, and predict diseases. In this way, IMAGYST is acting as best assistant for veterinarians, providing a better pet diagnosis experience for pet owners.

Amazon Web Services’ technical support has allowed Zoetis to realize a multi-dimensional upgrade for IMAGYST in terms of digitization, automation, and intelligence, and to create an integrated solution featuring combination of hardware and software infrastructures and of the cloud and the terminal.

• Leveraging digitalization to drive business growth in pet healthcare industry through combination of hardware and software infrastructures

IMAGYST can support quick, accurate detection and diagnosis in multiple therapy areas, providing powerful support for developing treatment plans. For example, in performing a worm egg detection, IMAGYST, relying on deep learning algorithms, classifies and identifies the scanned images based on big data, and provides in 9 minutes an immediate result as accurate as that offered by a parasite expert, solving the problem of over 50% omission rate of direct smear and passive floatation methods.

• Achieving cloud-powered simultaneous telemedicine across the globe through smart healthcare
  

With the multi-functional detector IMAGYST, medical organizations can complete detection of massive samples using fewer labor force, achieving semi-automation of disease diagnosis. Additionally, capitalizing on IMAGYST’s online consultation, interpretation of medical results, online review, and other functions, doctors can also communicate with pathologists worldwide to agilely deal with difficult diagnosis and treatment issues.

• Delivering tech-powered, better user experiences through innovative applications
  

Adopting intelligent technologies to improve diagnosis and treatment experience has become a common understanding in pet healthcare industry. In doing so, for pets, treatment process will be more friendly, reducing their high stress responses; for pet owners, taking pets to doctors will be more convenient, with diagnosis results more intuitively displayed; for pet hospitals, their professionalism will be improved, and their employees can access to industry experience shared by global experts and thus advance their careers.

“Early on in this project, IMAGYST’s go-live plan was delayed due to technical difficulties. But with the help of Amazon Web Services’ expert team, Zoetis completed the local deployment in Amazon Web Services China in record time. The team’s professional services were highly regarded by our teams in both China and the United States.” said Michael Tao, CIO of Zoetis Greater China, “With Amazon Web Services’ deep learning and AI solutions, our AI-powered multi-functional detector has achieved the leap from the terminal to the cloud and then to the combination of the cloud and the terminal. The in-depth collaboration between Zoetis and Amazon Web Services has not only created an innovative scenario for pet diagnosis and treatment, but also improved the speed and accuracy of pathology detection, making Zoetis can better serve more clients.”

Technology makes pet healthcare more scientific. The in-depth collaboration between Amazon Web Services and Zoetis applies deep learning and AI to pet healthcare, injecting a new vitality to the industry. Looking ahead, Amazon Web Services will continue to empower digitalization, automation, and intelligent transformation for clients, advancing the industry into a more standard, professional, and unique path and providing consumers with better user experiences.