Amazon continues
its expansion into the healthcare sector. On 2 December, Amazon Web Services
(AWS), the company's cloud computing arm, announced at the Re:Invent
conference in Las Vegas the launch of a
voice transcription service for physicians.
The new service, called Amazon Transcribe Medical, is designed to make clinical documentation more efficient by transcribing spoken medical dictation for primary care into text and incorporating it into a patient’s medical record.
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The new service can
be integrated into any device or app. However, since it deals with protected
health information (PHI) covered by the US Health
Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
of 1996, AWS is making
the service only available to those using its cloud. In other words, it will be
obligatory for customers to sign a business associate agreement with AWS and encrypt
all PHI.
Amazon Transcribe
Medical is a development on two Amazon’s products, Amazon Transcribe, launched in 2017 as
an automatic speech recognition service, and Amazon Comprehend
Medical, rolled out a year later. The latter allows developers to identify
medically relevant information, including diagnoses, symptoms, treatments, etc.
in an unstructured medical text.
According to AWS, Transcribe Medical addresses the current
challenges physicians face when confined to using a recorder to dictate notes,
which are then manually transcribed – an expensive and time-consuming procedure.
A special features allows correct
annotation of ‘domain specific language and abbreviations’, commonly used by primary
care professionals.
“Thanks to Amazon
Transcribe Medical, physicians will now be able to easily and
quickly dictate their clinical notes and see their speech converted to accurate
text in real-time, without any human intervention,” says Julien Simon, an
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Evangelist for EMEA, in
his blog.
Amazon’s partners
for Transcribe Medical are Cerner Corp. and Suki,
a voice-based digital assistant for doctors. With the new service, Cerner is in
the ‘initial development’ stage: the company linked Amazon's API into a
voice-scribe application and is trying to develop a digital tool that transcribes
physician–patient conversations during a patient's visit into text, by ‘listening’
in the background.
For Transcribe
Medical, which is currently available in US Northern Virginia and Oregon, Amazon
charges $0.0004 per second.
Clinical speech recognition is a rapidly developing area, in
which Amazon is competing with Microsoft and Google. The former is developing a
similar technology jointly
with Nuance Communications while the latter has
partnered with Suki to facilitate doctor–patient interaction by
using voice assistants.
Just as for other
tech giants, for Amazon healthcare is one of the priority areas. Last year it bought
a digital pharmacy PillPack (now part of Amazon Pharmacy). In
July 2019, UK’s NHS announced
Amazon Alexa to be officially used to deliver health advice to patients in the
United Kingdom. September 2019 saw the launch of Amazon Care, a healthcare
programme for employees, which combines virtual and in-person care, and a month
later Amazon acquired a digital
diagnostics and triage firm Health Navigator. The company has also entered into research
partnerships with healthcare groups to study how AI and voice services can
improve patient care.
Image credit: AWS