AWS launches AI-powered HealthScribe

On Wednesday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the launch of HealthScribe, a HIPAA-compliant, AI-powered medical scribe technology. The tool is designed to help healthcare software developers to create applications that use generative AI and speech recognition to advance clinical documentation efforts in an attempt to streamline provider workflows.  

“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. Today’s announcement builds on AWS’s commitment to the healthcare and life sciences industry and our responsible approach to technologies like generative AI to help reduce the burden of clinical documentation and improve the consultation experience,” said Bratin Saha, vice president of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Services at AWS, in the press release.  

The healthcare market has witnessed an explosion of AI-powered medical scribe tools, all striving to combat physician documentation burdens, which can take almost twice as much time as direct patient care. AWS HealthScribe differs in that it uses generative AI, which Amazon claims is the “missing piece” of the documentation puzzle.   

By using generative AI, AWS HealthScribe promises to create the medical transcript and intelligently select keywords, like symptoms and medication, and create summarized medical notes like key takeaways, reason for visit, and relevant medical history that can be put directly into an electronic health record (EHR).  

HealthScribe will automatically identify the speakers as clinicianor patient and write the transcript accordingly. The medical summary will also include citations, so that providers or patients can refer back to the original doctor-patient conversation transcripts, ensuring enhanced accuracy and transparency. 

Innovation without burdensome maintenance

AWS HealthScribe is supported by Amazon BedRock, a platform that offers ways to build generative AI-powered applications using pretrained models from both startups and Amazon, so that developers can use foundational models through an API without starting from scratch and without needing to manage the machine learning infrastructure themselves.  

“Our healthcare customers and partners tell us they want to spend more time creating innovative clinical care and research solutions for their patients while spending less time building, maintaining, and operating foundational health data capabilities,” Saha continued. “That is why AWS has invested in building a portfolio of AI-powered, high-performance, and population-scale health applications so that clinicians can spend more time with the patients during the face-to-face or telehealth visits.