How Amazon’s AI Developments are Revolutionising Healthcare
In the wake of a global pandemic, the healthcare sector has experienced upheaval like never before.
Now, integrating disruptive technologies like AI into healthcare is ultimately seeking to transform the sector. AI can help across a range of different healthcare areas, including clinical documents, drug discovery and development and pharmaceuticals.
At the forefront of this transformation is tech giant Amazon, who continue to prioritise bolstering AI offerings to streamline processes across multiple industries. Within healthcare, the possibilities are endless, as the company seeks to partner with leading organisations to enhance patient care and support medical staff.
“Amazon aims to democratise AI capabilities for the healthcare industry - and ultimately make it easier for customers and patients to get and stay healthy,” the company says. “We believe we can make the health care experience easier for patients and providers, and we know generative AI will play a critical role in that.”
We examine some of the ways Amazon utilises AI to advance healthcare.
Empowering those in healthcare with responsible AI
One of the ways that Amazon harnesses AI is via its HealthScribe service. It is designed to alleviate the burden of administrative tasks on healthcare professionals, freeing them up to spend more time on complex parts of their jobs, or with their patients.
HealthScribe uses generative AI (Gen AI) to automatically generate clinical notes from doctor-patient conversations. The service is HIPAA-eligible and ensures greater transparency by citing every detail from the conversation transcript. Doctors can then review these and approve notes before they are entered into electronic health records.
AWS, as part of Amazon, has invested in building a portfolio of AI-powered and high-performance health applications to ensure patient care is a key priority. More broadly, Amazon’s commitment to responsible AI development via its partnerships to enhance patient outcomes with the power of machine learning.
Some of the organisations that the tech giant collaborates with include: Advocate, Mass General, Mount Sinai, Pfizer and Gilead.
Amazon Pharmacy: Changing the game with machine learning
Amazon is also eager to help researchers in drug discovery and pharmaceuticals to reduce time and cost to market, in addition to advancing the life sciences sector.
In particular, Amazon Pharmacy is working to leverage Gen AI to fill prescriptions quickly and make customer service faster and more useful for customers. The service is also working on AI applications that provide more transparent pricing so that customers can gain the best price, which is more convenient and less time-consuming for them.
The service also seeks to address the challenge of prescription accuracy by harnessing AWS Textract, a computer vision service that extracts printed text and handwriting from documents. It aims to ensure that prescriptions are filled quickly and accurately, whilst reducing concerns over human error.
However, despite these innovations, Amazon is eager to maintain a human element to its technology. For instance, pharmacists still need to review each patient prescription to ensure that no detail is missed.
By enabling humans and AI to work together, Amazon is working to make sure that services are processed much faster and more conveniently for patients and healthcare workers alike.
“There has never been a time in Amazon’s history where we’ve felt there is so much opportunity to make our customers’ lives better and easier,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in his 2023 letter to Amazon shareholders.
“We’re incredibly excited about what’s possible, focused on inventing the future, and look forward to working together to make it so.”
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