Amazon Launches New Service As Google, Microsoft Aim At Merging Healthcare With Artificial Intelligence
Dr V. W. Verlekar - TSI Goa - 27 July 2023
JULY 2023
Dr Vibhav W. Verlekar
7/27/20233 min read
Amazon Web Services on Wednesday launched a new generative tool that will allow software developers and healthcare providers to use speech recognition, machine learning and AI to summarize doctors’ visits and manage files, according to the company—the latest move by a tech giant to merge healthcare with artificial intelligence.
The company’s newly announced tool, HealthScribe, is meant to phase out the time-consuming documentation process taken on by doctors, replacing it with a programming interface that can transcribe, extract medical terms and medications and create summaries from doctor-patient discussions, forever stored in an electronic health record, according to Amazon.
The tool would take doctor-patient conversation transcripts and dilute them down into quick-study materials that include why a patient visited the doctor, the history of their illness and other key takeaways, referencing the original, full transcript as a footnote for every sentence, Amazon said.
Amazon also promises the patient-specific inputs and outputs will not be used to train HealthScribe, and providers will have to train their own language models specific to their office, specialty and other details, like common prescription names and dosages.
Amazon is the latest giant to enter the high-tech healthcare space: Microsoft last year acquired health AI company Nuance and Google has been developing Med-PaLM, an AI model that quickly provides doctors with medical knowledge they may otherwise have had to spend time looking up.
Nuance Communications and Microsoft in March announced they had developed the first fully AI-automated clinical documentation application, extremely similar to HealthScribe in that it transcribes and summarizes conversations that were before manually managed.
Google’s Med-PaLM incorporates AI in a different way, allowing clinicians to ask complex questions and receive accurate answers or probable diagnoses based on a patient's complaints, symptoms and medical history.