Amazon is continuing its push into the healthcare space with voice transcription technology that can convert clinician and patient speech to text and allow developers to integrate medical transcription into clinical documentation applications.
Amazon Transcribe Medical will instantly transcribe doctor-patient interactions into the patient’s existing electronic medical record. The internet behemoth launched the service at its Web Services’ re:Invent conference Tuesday.
CNBC reported that Matt Wood, vice president of artificial intelligence at AWS, said, “Our overarching goal is to free up the doctor, so they have more attention going to where it should be directed. And that’s to the patient.”
Amazon Transcribe Medical is HIPAA-eligible and can integrate with voice-enabled applications and any device with a microphone. Output transcripts will support word-level time stamps and confidence scores.
Users can call the programming interface, open a secure connection and start passing a stream of audio to the service. In return, users receive a stream of text in real time. That’s in stark contrast to the current standards of dictation software that requires hours of screen time for documentation or third-party transcription services that may take days to return their work.
Amazon said physicians will be able to leverage its transcribed notes more quickly after patient encounters and speed up entry into electronic health record systems.
The transcription tool can be used with Amazon Comprehend Medical, which allows developers to process unstructured medical text and identify information such as patient diagnosis, treatments, dosages and symptoms.
Wood said the company created the software with the help of customers such as IT company Cerner because there was a “lot of demand for it,” CNBC reported.
