AWS Releases Generative AI Service for Clinical Documentation

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) has announced AWS HealthScribe, a generative AI-based service to support automatic clinical documentation.

With AWS HealthScribe, health IT providers can use a single API to automatically create transcripts, extract key details, and create summaries from clinician-patient interactions that can be entered into the EHR.

The service aims to allow health IT developers to integrate generative AI capabilities into their applications without the need to manage the underlying machine learning (ML) infrastructure or train large language models (LLMs). HealthScribe will support generative AI capabilities for general medicine and orthopedics specialties "to start," officials noted.

AWS HealthScribe is set to support "responsible deployment of AI systems" by citing the source of each line of generated text from the original conversation transcript, making it easier for providers to review notes before entering them into the 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," Bratin Saha, vice president of machine learning and artificial intelligence services at AWS, said in a press release.

"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," Saha added. "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."

Three health IT vendors have announced they will use HealthScribe: 3M Health Information Systems (HIS), Babylon, and ScribeEMR.

"Machine learning on AWS enables 3M HIS to transform clinician workflows and laborious processes to help healthcare organizations streamline clinical documentation and billing," said Garri Garrison, president of 3M HIS. "3M HIS is collaborating with AWS to bring conversational and generative AI directly into clinical documentation workflows."

"AWS HealthScribe will be a core component of our clinician applications to help expedite, refine, and scale the delivery of 3M's ambient clinical documentation and virtual assistant solutions," he added.