AWS recently announced a new HIPAA-eligible service called AWS HealthScribe in a preview that uses speech recognition and generative AI (powered by Amazon Bedrock) to generate clinical documentation.
The company describes AWS HealthScribe as a combination of conversational and generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) to reduce the burden of clinical documentation and improve the consultation experience. By leveraging the service, users gain access to a comprehensive set of AI-powered functionalities tailored to expedite clinical documentation within their clinical application.
AWS HealthScribe offers healthcare software providers 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 be entered into an electronic health record (EHR) system.
For instance, notes created in HealthScribe are augmented by AI, including details such as the reason(s) for a visit, the history of the present illness, assessment, and follow-up.
Example of the application experience that healthcare developers can provide users with AWS HealthScribe (Source: AWS for Industries blog post)
The authors of an AWS for Industries blog post mention the benefits of AWS HealthScribe:
By consolidating these capabilities, AWS HealthScribe reduces the need for training, optimizing, integrating separate AI services, and building custom models, allowing for faster implementation. Customers can focus on delivering value to their end users without worrying about optimizing individual AI components.
On the other hand, while the service is HIPAA-eligible, companies must sign a contract known as a business associate addendum, which AWS’ documentation covers in detail to become fully compliant.
Besides AWS, Microsoft, and Google have healthcare offerings like AWS HealthScribe. For example, Microsoft Healthcare Bot is a cloud service that enables healthcare organizations to build and deploy conversational agents that can be used for various purposes, such as triage and symptom checking. Or the Google Cloud Healthcare API provides a suite of healthcare-specific products and services built on the Google Cloud Platform.
Bertalan Meskó, a Director at the Medical Futurist Institute, Ph.D. and MD, commented in a LinkedIn post:
It's exciting to see tech giants marching into healthcare, and we should all be happy about it as they are much better at creating technologies people want to use than healthcare/pharma companies.
In addition, Simon Dawlat, a CEO at Batch, tweeted:
Gold rush of AI-based clinical doc APIs in full swing with Amazon joining Microsoft/Google with the launch of HealthScribe—yet all those FAANG-powered products feel awkward compared to what laser-focused cos like @NablaTech have to offer.
Race is on!
Other comparable solutions are available from companies such as Nuance, offering conversational AI for healthcare and customer engagement, and Cerner Corporation (Oracle), a supplier of health information technology solutions, services, devices, and hardware.
Lastly, AWS HealthScribe is currently available in US East (N. Virginia) region only, and customers can sign up via a form to access the service. Its pricing details can be found on the pricing page, and other details in the documentation.