In a partnership to solve one of the most critical pain points for healthcare providers, Amazon and 3M Health Information Systems have announced a bold collaboration that will leverage generative artificial intelligence (AI) to ease clinical documentation for healthcare providers. Through this partnership, the two companies aim to create a tool to automate clinical documentation using conversational AI and ambient intelligence.
This makes documentation a byproduct of the patient visits rather than a separate, burdensome task for physicians. This development could revolutionize the clinical documentation process and improve the efficiency of healthcare delivery, a much-needed solution given the significant shortage of physicians and the growing aging population.
AWS will contribute its expertise and resources to the partnership, including its Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Comprehend Medical, and Amazon Transcribe Medical platforms. Bedrock is Amazon’s novel approach to building and scaling generative AI applications with foundation models.
At the same time, Comprehend Medical is a natural language processing service that uses machine learning to extract medical information from unstructured medical text. Transcribe Medical is an automatic speech recognition service that makes adding medical speech-to-text capabilities to voice-enabled applications easy.
Combining these various services and platforms could revolutionize the clinical documentation process, a significant pain point in the healthcare industry. A 2016 study found that for every hour physicians provide direct clinical facetime to patients, nearly two additional hours are spent on EHR and desk work within the clinic day. This inefficiency needs to be resolved, especially given the significant shortage of physicians nationally and globally, the millions of people that struggle daily to get a timely doctor’s appointment, and the growing aging population.
According to the press release, 3M HIS will collaborate with AWS to enhance its conversational AI platform. This collaboration aims to develop machine learning (ML)-based clinical documentation and virtual assistant solutions that are responsible and supportive. These solutions will seamlessly integrate into healthcare workflows and enable physicians to maintain control over the patient’s health record information.
This partnership is not the first attempt to tackle the issue of clinical documentation. Microsoft announced last month that it would use its expertise with ChatGPT to create a more dynamic clinical documentation process via Dragon, one of the industry’s leading clinical dictation tools. Undoubtedly, caution in development is necessary, mainly as it entails sensitive and private patient health information. However, if developed ethically, soundly, and safely, this partnership between Amazon and 3M could revolutionize the healthcare industry.
