AWS HealthScribe Focuses on Clinical Documentation Workflows

Amazon Web Services is getting into the automated scribe market with AWS HealthScribe, a service designed to help software vendors build clinical applications that automatically generate preliminary clinical notes by analyzing patient-clinician conversations.

AWS said three companies— 3M, ScribeEMR, and Babylon —are already using AWS HealthScribe to power their clinical applications.

AWS noted that advancements in generative AI and large language models have significantly improved contextual understanding, which unlocks new opportunities for building assistive tools that free up time for patient care to transform healthcare delivery.

According to an AWS blog, the new tool analyzes the patient-clinician conversation audio to provide:

1. Rich Consultation Transcripts: AWS HealthScribe provides a comprehensive turn-by-turn transcript with word-level timestamps for each dialogue in the transcript.
2. Speaker Role Identification: Individuals present in the exam room are uniquely identified in the transcript and dialogue is attributed to the doctor or patient. This enables a clear understanding of “who said what” in the doctor-patient interaction throughout the encounter.
3. Transcript Segmentation: AWS HealthScribe categorizes transcript dialogues and organizes the clinically relevant portions into appropriate summary sections such as subjective, objective, assessment, and plan. It also identifies small talk and periods of silence in the conversation which helps users locate specific portions of the transcript.
4. Summarized Clinical Notes: AWS HealthScribe analyzes consultation conversations to generate summarized clinical notes for sections like chief complaint, history of present illness, assessment, and plan. These summaries are easy to review, edit, and finalize, and can provide quick recap highlights of patient visits to clinicians and scribes, AWS said.
5. Evidence Mapping: Every sentence used in the AI-generated clinical note includes references to the original consultation transcript, making it easier for users to validate the accuracy of the summary.
6. Structured Medical Terms: AWS HealthScribe extracts structured medical terms from the conversation transcript, such as medical conditions, medications, and treatments. These medical terms can be used to generate useful workflow suggestions and auto-suggest relevant entries for various fields in the clinical application.

AWS provided quotes from executives 3M, ScribeEMR, and Babylon about why they are using AWS HealthScribe to power their clinical applications.

3M Health Information Systems’ various M*Modal speech understanding, conversational and ambient AI solutions are currently used by more than 300,000 clinicians. “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, 3M HIS, in a statement. “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.”

Babylon is an integrated digital-first primary care service that manages population health at scale. “Integrating AI with human medical expertise can make quality healthcare more affordable and accessible, and alleviates burdens on providers,” said Saurabh Johri, chief science officer, Babylon, in a statement. “Innovating in areas like clinical summarization is one example with the potential to improve healthcare outcomes. As a leader in AI innovation, Babylon looks forward to continuing our collaboration with AWS and exploring integrating AWS HealthScribe’s generative AI capabilities with our natural language processing solutions.”

ScribeEMR is a provider of virtual medical scribing, virtual medical coding, and virtual medical office services for hundreds of medical practices, hospitals, and health systems. “ScribeEMR’s goal is to help increase practice efficiency, maximize revenue, and reduce clinician burnout in the healthcare industry,” said Daya Shankar, co-founder and general manager at ScribeEMR, in a statement. “By harnessing the power of AWS HealthScribe, we can transform the process of healthcare documentation using generative AI. With AWS HealthScribe, our advanced processes can now capture and interpret patient visits more effectively and optimize EMR workflows, coding, and reimbursement processes.”