Amazon Debuts HIPAA-Eligible Generative AI for Healthcare Providers

By
Vivian Medithi
Vivian Medithi
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Vivian Medithi is a freelance writer and critic with bylines at Guardian US, LA Review of Books and No Bells, among others. He previously covered the stock market as an Analyst Editor at InvestorPlace.
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Published July 26, 2023
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Amazon (AMZN) will offer a healthcare-focused generative AI service intended to cut down on the time doctors spend on clinical documentation.

Key Takeaways

  • AWS HealthScribe uses artificial intelligence to transcribe and summarize patient-provider conversations.
  • Amazon says they will not use the inputs or outputs from AWS HealthScribe for data training.
  • The medical transcription field has a number of AI players, including Microsoft-owned Nuance.

AWS HealthScribe is a HIPAA-eligible service that analyzes and transcribes conversations between doctors and patients.

It works as a digital stenographer, providing a written record of the conversation between doctor and patient, as well as a brief summary of the conversation's key points. It is designed to protect patient privacy, Amazon said.

"AWS will not use inputs or outputs generated through the AWS HealthScribe service to train AWS HealthScribe," the company said in a statement. "Users have full control over their data and determine where they prefer to store transcriptions and preliminary clinical notes."

The medical AI field has seen significant use of large language models since 2018. While there is ongoing research into whether or not generative artificial intelligence (AI) can produce reliable clinical diagnoses, there are a number of transcription services similar to those offered by AWS HealthScribe. In March, Microsoft (MSFT) subsidiary Nuance announced a fully automated clinical documentation application.

AWS HealthScribe is a service that healthcare providers can integrate into their own clinical applications, not a standalone app; early adopters highlighted in the company's announcement include healthcare software vendors Babylon, 3M and ScribeEMR. As with other forms of AI, automated speech recognition is prone to racial disparities.

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  1. AWS. "Introducing AWS HealthScribe – automatically generate clinical notes from patient-clinician conversations using AWS HealthScribe."

  2. New York Times. "A.I. May Someday Work Medical Miracles. For Now, It Helps Do Paperwork."

  3. NPR. "Doctors are drowning in paperwork. Some companies claim AI can help"

  4. PubMed. "Assessing the Utility of ChatGPT Throughout the Entire Clinical Workflow"

  5. Nuance. "Nuance and Microsoft Announce the First Fully AI-Automated Clinical Documentation Application for Healthcare"

  6. PNAS. "Racial disparities in automated speech recognition"

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