Why Should You Care About Amazon's New Medical Language Processing Service

This week Amazon announced a new service called AWS Comprehend Medical at AWS Re:Invent 2018 that can potentially impact the whole medical records ecosystem. Although electronic health records (EHR) exist for more than a decade, the majority of historical patient data is still stored today as unstructured medical text, such as medical notes, prescriptions, audio interview transcripts, and printed pathology and radiology reports. Extracting meaningful information from these is still a time-consuming process, and either requires data entry by high skilled medical experts, or teams of developers writing custom code.

Comprehend Medical leverages Amazon’s AI technology to build a health record industry-specific solution, that uses natural language processing (NLP) to extract health-related text and data from virtually any medical record. Comprehend Medical empowers developers to process unstructured medical text and identify information such as patient diagnosis, treatments, dosages, symptoms and signs, and more. This will, in turn, help health care providers such as hospitals, insurers, and clinical trial investigators to improve clinical decision support, streamline revenue cycle and clinical trials management. Since Comprehend Medical has built-in HIPAA compliance, health care providers will be able to better address data privacy and protected health information (PHI) requirements. Other startups such as Mendel is building similar AI-powered medical data extraction platform for clinical data relevant to cancer research.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.