Tech corporations small and huge have wager on AI relieving administrative burden and clinician burnout — suppose Microsoft’s Nuance and smaller startups like Suki and Notable.
However with Amazon‘s entry into the area final week with its HealthScribe answer, the race’s contours have shifted. As an alternative of going on to hospitals with its personal answer like a Nuance or Suki, Amazon’s take is barely completely different, mentioned Yuanling Yuan, principal at SignalFire. The Seattle firm is creating an API that may assist each itself and exterior builders/startups construct and scale generative AI to deal with the burden of medical documentation. Not everybody, nevertheless, believes this strategy will work.
Yuan mentioned that medical documentation startup Well being Be aware — one among SignalFire’s portfolio corporations — has been exploring potential partnership alternatives with HealthScribe however would see Suki or Nuance as its rivals.
Regardless of their completely different approaches, having well-known corporations soar into the sphere of medical documentation is an efficient signal for drained clinicians.
“The U.S. inhabitants would profit tremendously from mainstream adoption of those autonomous medical workflow instruments, like scribing, as it’s going to rebalance the quantity of a doctor’s time accessible for seeing sufferers,” Yuan defined. “If it takes tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon to assist the business cross the chasm, then I see HealthScribe as a optimistic step in the precise course.”
HealthScribe’s AI capabilities are powered by Bedrock, a platform Amazon designed to assist itself, in addition to exterior startups, construct and scale generative AI merchandise. The thought behind HealthScribe is that healthcare software program corporations will use its AI capabilities to create medical word era apps that suppliers can later undertake to streamline the documentation course of.
Healthcare software program suppliers can use the API to generate transcripts from patient-clinician interactions. These transcripts determine speaker roles and break the dialog up into classes, equivalent to small discuss, subjective feedback and goal statements. The transcripts additionally extract key particulars, equivalent to medicines, diagnoses and recommendation for follow-up care.
Amazon mentioned that HealthScribe makes it simpler and quicker for healthcare software program suppliers to combine generative AI capabilities into their merchandise as a result of they don’t must handle the underlying machine studying infrastructure or prepare their very own giant language fashions. 3M Well being Data Methods, Babylon Well being and ScribeEMR are the primary three corporations that might be utilizing HealthScribe to construct generative AI apps, in keeping with Amazon’s press launch.
“Amazon HealthScribe’s wager is that they might rise with the tide of all of the well being tech software program distributors attempting to deal with these documentation challenges versus competing instantly, which is usually a intelligent technique because the switching prices of a hospital already utilizing a vendor like 3M, reportedly one among HealthScribe’s first clients, is often very excessive,” she declared.
Whereas Amazon’s strategy is completely different from many different corporations within the medical documentation AI area, there are nonetheless some doubts about whether or not HealthScribe might be profitable in tackling the doctor burnout drawback.
Ian Shakil, founding father of ambient medical documentation agency Augmedix, described HealthScribe as “Lego bricks for others to construct an finish product” in a latest tweet. He identified that these Lego bricks do little to facilitate bi-directional EHR integration, create standardization throughout supplier varieties and specialties, or present a framework for return on funding.
Completely satisfied to share my ideas.
Re AWS…
HealthScribe is lego bricks for others to construct an finish product on this area. AWS has provided these lego bricks for a while; Amazon Medical Comprehend (NLP) and Amazon Medical Transcribe (ASR) have been round for a while, and now they…
— Ian Shakil (@ianshakil) July 29, 2023
Shakil’s tweet highlighted the truth that HealthScribe has no supplier clients, so it’s troublesome to foretell whether or not the API will be capable to create significant change in relation to offloading clinicians’ administrative burden.
Stakeholders must wait and see whether or not the healthcare expertise corporations utilizing HealthScribe will be capable to create and deploy options that may assist alleviate suppliers’ burnout. In the event that they find yourself unsuccessful, it will likely be attention-grabbing to see whether or not Amazon pivots or scraps the undertaking totally. Within the final three years, Amazon has shuttered three of its healthcare divisions — its Halo wearables unit, its hybrid main and pressing care enterprise Amazon Care, and Haven, its three way partnership with JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway.
Photograph: Flickr, Cerillion Skyline
