AWS launches gen AI-powered service to tackle clinical documentation

Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Wednesday unveiled its new HIPAA-eligible HealthScribe service, which uses speech recognition and generative artificial intelligence (AI) to allow healthcare software providers to build time-saving applications aimed at helping clinicians cut back on paperwork. These include automatically creating transcripts, generating clinical notes and analysing patient-clinician conversations.

"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," remarked Bratin Saha, vice president of machine learning and AI services at AWS.

With HealthScribe, which was unveiled at the AWS Summit, developers can use a single application programming interface (API) to automatically create clinical documentation that can then be entered into an electronic health record (EHR) system. By integrating the service into a clinical application, healthcare providers can use built-in text-to-speech capabilities to generate conversation transcripts that identify speaker roles, and segment transcripts into categories – such as subjective or objective comments, or even small talk – based on clinical relevance.

The application can leverage the service's natural language processing (NLP) and generative AI abilities to extract structured medical terms, such as conditions and medications, and produce discussion-based notes that include relevant details that a clinician can review and finalise in the EHR. The service, powered by Amazon Bedrock, will first be available to create clinical notes for general medicine and orthopaedics. HealthScribe is currently available as a preview in the eastern US region.

Early adopters

AWS said 3M, Babylon Health and ScribeEMR are among the companies already using HealthScribe. Garri Garrison, president of 3M's health information systems division, said the service will be a "core component of our clinician applications to help expedite, refine, and scale the delivery of [our] ambient clinical documentation and virtual assistant solutions." Daya Shankar, co-founder of ScribeEMR, said the service has enabled its advanced processes to "now capture and interpret patient visits more effectively and optimise EMR workflows, coding, and reimbursement processes." Meanwhile, Babylon plans to explore integrating HealthScribe's generative AI capabilities with its own NLP solutions, according to the company's chief science officer Saurabh Johri.

AWS also announced the general availability of AWS HealthImaging, a service designed to make it easier to store transform, and analyse medical imaging data at a petabyte scale. Customers can use the service to run medical imaging apps from a single copy of each medical image in the AWS cloud.

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