Doctor AI? Amazon brings AI into healthcare with its new suite of AI-powered services
Amazon has announced the launch of AWS HealthScribe, a new platform that offers AI tools to assist clinicians in transcribing and analysing their conversations with patients.
Unveiled at the AWS Summit conference in New York, HealthScribe’s API generates transcripts and extracts relevant details from doctor-patient discussions, which can be entered into electronic health record (EHR) systems.
Amazon’s machine learning models can convert these transcripts into patient notes, enabling clinicians to review them for broader insights.
Documentation is Now Much More Efficient
The main goal of HealthScribe is to alleviate the time-consuming burden of documentation for healthcare professionals. The platform identifies speaker roles and segments transcripts into categories based on clinical relevance, such as “small talk,” “subjective comments,” or “objective comments.”
Moreover, HealthScribe incorporates natural language processing capabilities to extract structured medical terms like medications and medical conditions from the conversations.
Concerns Over AI Inaccuracy
There are concerns regarding biases and inaccuracies that might be present in generative AI applications. Studies have shown that speech recognition systems from major tech companies are twice as likely to incorrectly transcribe audio from Black speakers compared to white speakers. This raises questions about HealthScribe’s consistency and ability to handle diverse accents and vernaculars.
To address potential mistakes, HealthScribe is currently limited to creating clinical notes for general medicine and orthopaedics. Clinicians using the platform can review and finalise the generated notes before entering them into the EHR.
Furthermore, Amazon emphasises HealthScribe’s security and privacy aspects, assuring that customer data is not retained after processing requests, and data is encrypted during transmission and at rest.
Health Imaging Backed by AI
In addition to HealthScribe, Amazon has also introduced AWS HealthImaging, a service designed to store, transform, and analyse medical imaging data at a petabyte scale. The platform allows customers to run medical imaging apps using a single copy of each medical image in the AWS cloud. HealthImaging offers dynamic pricing for active and archive data and provides subsecond image access latencies from various storage tiers.
Although AWS claims that HealthImaging can reduce the total cost of ownership of medical imaging storage by up to 40%, some remain cautious about the technology’s implementation and its impact on healthcare workflows.
Both HealthScribe and HealthImaging contribute to Amazon’s expanding portfolio of cloud-based health services, aiming to improve clinical documentation and image management for the healthcare industry.
