AWS broadcasts generative AI tool to avoid wasting doctors time on paperwork

Amazon Web Services on Wednesday announced a recent service for health-care software providers called AWS HealthScribe, which uses generative artificial intelligence and speech recognition to robotically draft clinical documentation.

The service goals to avoid wasting health-care employees time using AI-generated transcripts and summaries of patient visits, which might then be entered into the electronic health record system. AWS HealthScribe may also extract notable medical terms, medications and other key details, in accordance with the corporate, and physicians can double-check each line of generated text with the unique transcript.

Clinical documentation is a significant pain point for doctors and nurses. A study funded by the American Medical Association in 2016 found that for each hour a physician spent with a patient, they spent a further two hours on administrative work. The study said physicians also are inclined to spend a further one to 2 hours doing clerical work outside of working hours, which many within the industry confer with as “pajama time.”

Because of this, several firms like Microsoft’s Nuance Communications, and now AWS, have been working to construct solutions to scale back this administrative burden.

“It is obvious that generative AI has the ability to remodel the health-care and life sciences industry in some ways,” Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS’s vp of database, analytics and machine-learning services said at during a keynote speech at AWS Summit Latest York Wednesday.

Microsoft’s Nuance announced its generative clinical notes application, DAX Express, in March. Much like AWS HealthScribe, Dax Express robotically generates a draft of a clinical note inside seconds after a patient visit. It could possibly record a conversation between a physician and a patient in real time and create a note using a mix of existing AI and OpenAI’s newest model, GPT-4.

With each services, physicians can review the AI-generated notes before entering them into the electronic health record system.

AWS HealthScribe is powered by Amazon Bedrock, which is the corporate’s service for constructing generative AI applications. AWS said Wednesday that AWS HealthScribe is compliant with HIPAA and doesn’t retain any customer information. Customers may also select where they would really like to store their clinical documentation.

The fee of the service will vary, as AWS HealthScribe is on the market on a pay-as-you-go basis, in accordance with an organization blog post. Customers can be charged based on the seconds of audio processed per 30 days.

Several organizations are already using HealthScribe, in accordance with AWS, including the software company 3M Health Information Systems. Detlef Koll, 3M’s vp of world R&D, said the corporate has been working with AWS since this past fall to introduce the technology responsibly, ideally without causing disruptions in documentation quality. 

Koll said the technology is “excellent,” in his experience, and that the tool is not going to function as decision support or change the care that patients receive.

“Technology is an enabler for an answer, it isn’t the answer,” Koll told CNBC in an interview Wednesday. 

The initial use cases for AWS HealthScribe were geared toward general medicine and orthopedics specialties, in accordance with an AWS company release. The technology is on the market in a limited private preview capability starting Wednesday, and Tehsin Syed, general manager of health AI at AWS, said the corporate plans to work closely with its customers to find out plans for expanding access. 

“We update the underlying technology based on the feedback that we’re getting,” Syed told CNBC. He added, “From an adoption perspective, I believe there’s a variety of interest, and we wish to be very careful about ensuring it’ll work at scale in the suitable way.”