August 9, 2023
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), has announced AWS HealthScribe, a new HIPAA-eligible service that empowers healthcare software providers to build clinical applications that use speech recognition and generative AI to save clinicians time by generating clinical documentation, according to news posted to Amazon’s corporate site.
With AWS HealthScribe, healthcare software providers can use a single API to automatically create robust transcripts, extract key details (e.g., medical terms and medications) and create summaries from doctor-patient discussions that can then be entered into an electronic health record (EHR) system.
Powered by Amazon Bedrock, AWS HealthScribe was designed to make it faster and easier for healthcare software providers to integrate generative AI capabilities into their application starting with two popular specialties (i.e., general medicine and orthopedics), without needing to manage the underlying machine learning (ML) infrastructure or train their own healthcare-specific large language models (LLMs).
AWS HealthScribe enables responsible deployment of AI systems by citing the source of every line of generated text from within the original conversation transcript, making it easier for physicians to review clinical notes before entering them into the EHR. Built with security and privacy in mind, Amazon says that AWS HealthScribe gives customers control over where their data is stored, encrypts data in transit and at rest, and does not use inputs or outputs generated through the service to train its models.
AWS says that by integrating HealthScribe into a clinical application, healthcare providers can leverage built-in speech-to-text capabilities to create robust conversation transcripts that identify speaker roles and segment transcripts into categories (e.g., small talk, subjective comments, or objective comments) based on clinical relevance. The application can then use AWS HealthScribe’s NLP and generative AI capabilities to extract structured medical terms, such as medical conditions and medications, and generate discussion-based notes that include relevant details (e.g., key takeaways, reason for visit, and history of the present illness) that a clinician can review and finalize in their EHR.
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Data security and privacy are also built into the service–the service does not retain any customer data after processing the customer request and encrypts customer data in transit and at rest. Healthcare software providers have control over where they want to store transcriptions and preliminary clinical notes, maintaining ownership of their content. Additionally, the inputs and outputs generated through the service will not be used to train AWS HealthScribe.
“Our healthcare customers and partners tell us they want to spend more time creating innovative clinical care and research solutions for their patients while spending less time building, maintaining and operating foundational health data capabilities,” says Bratin Saha, vice-president of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Services at AWS.
“That is why AWS has invested in building a portfolio of AI-powered, high-performance, and population-scale health applications, so that clinicians can spend more time with the patients during the face-to-face or telehealth visits. Documentation is a particularly time-consuming effort for healthcare professionals, which is why we are excited to leverage the power of generative AI in AWS HealthScribe and reduce that burden. Today’s announcement builds on AWS’s commitment to the healthcare and life sciences industry and our responsible approach to technologies like generative AI to help reduce the burden of clinical documentation and improve the consultation experience,” said Saha.
To learn more about AWS HealthScribe, visit https://aws.amazon.com/healthscribe.
To learn more about AWS HealthImaging, visit https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/industries/introducing-aws-healthimaging/.
