GenAI-powered Healthscribe automates note-taking for doctors

NEW YORK – Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced AWS HealthScribe, a service that uses speech recognition and generative AI to save clinicians time by generating clinical documentation.

The technology is aimed at developers, who can use it to create products. For example, 3M is using the system to create its own solution for physicians. It will monitor the "ambient sound" in the exam room to produce transcripts and summaries of patient-doctor encounters.

With AWS HealthScribe, healthcare software providers can use a single API to automatically create robust transcripts, extract key details (e.g., medical terms and medications), and create summaries from doctor-patient discussions that can then be entered into an electronic health record (EHR) system.

Powered by Amazon Bedrock, AWS HealthScribe makes it faster and easier for healthcare software providers to integrate generative AI capabilities into their application starting with two popular specialties (i.e. general medicine and orthopedics), without needing to manage the underlying machine learning (ML) infrastructure or train their own healthcare-specific large language models (LLMs).

AWS HealthScribe enables responsible deployment of AI systems by citing the source of every line of generated text from within the original conversation transcript, making it easier for physicians to review clinical notes before entering them into the EHR. Built with security and privacy in mind, AWS HealthScribe gives customers control over where their data is stored, encrypts data in transit and at rest, and does not use inputs or outputs generated through the service to train its models. To learn more about AWS HealthScribe, visit?https://aws.amazon.com/healthscribe.

Generative AI is quickly transforming many industries, including healthcare and life sciences. As interest in generative AI continues to grow, healthcare software vendors are looking to leverage this technology in their clinical applications to solve common pain points for clinicians in the healthcare industry.

One of the most common issues is compiling clinical documentation after every patient-clinician discussion. This is important for compliance, quality measures, and reimbursement, but it is also a complex, multi-step process that takes time away from seeing patients. While many of these healthcare software providers use text to speech and natural language processing (NLP) to streamline this process today, generative AI has been the missing piece to help these applications go from recorded discussions to concise clinical documentation that can be entered into an EHR.

AWS HealthScribe is an AI-powered, HIPAA-eligible health service that enables healthcare software providers to build clinical applications that save clinicians time by automatically creating transcripts, generating notes, and analyzing patient-clinician conversations. With a single, easy-to-use API, healthcare software providers can create these clinical solutions quickly and focus on building a differentiated experience for their end users, reducing the need to integrate and optimize multiple separate AI services into their application.

By integrating AWS HealthScribe into a clinical application, healthcare providers can leverage built-in text-to-speech capabilities to create robust conversation transcripts that identify speaker roles and segment transcripts into categories (e.g., small talk, subjective comments, or objective comments) based on clinical relevance. The application can then use AWS HealthScribe’s NLP and generative AI capabilities to extract structured medical terms, such as medical conditions and medications, and generate discussion-based notes that include relevant details (e.g. key takeaways, reason for visit, and history of the present illness) that a clinician can review and finalize in their EHR.

“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,” said Bratin Saha (pictured), vice president of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Services at AWS. “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. 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.”

AWS HealthScribe is part of a broad set of purpose-built health services that help thousands of healthcare and life sciences customers reinvent how they collaborate, make data-driven clinical and operational decisions, advance precision medicine, and decrease the cost of care.

Continuing its innovation in the healthcare field, AWS also announced the general availability of AWS HealthImaging, a service that makes it easier to store, transform, and analyze medical imaging data at a petabyte scale – delivering performance while reducing the burden of provisioning underlying infrastructure. To learn more about AWS HealthImaging, visit?https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/industries/introducing-aws-healthimaging/