Role of Amazon’s AI in Healthcare
Healthful Vitality | 07/17/2021 | By Tech Contributor | Role of Amazon’s AI in Healthcare
The role of Amazon’s AI in healthcare is significant in the future of healthcare to enable efficient patient care. Indeed, structured data is crucial for training machine learning algorithms. Unfortunately, although EHRs (electronic health records) have been here for quite a while now, they still contain too much-unstructured data that cannot use satisfactorily. Not to mention the hand-written notes, admission forms, test reports, and prescriptions buried in hordes of hospital charts, which are impossible to process by bots. Furthermore, manually sorting and analyzing these medical records is challenging and time-consuming, requiring medical specialists to understand and input data or developers to write custom codes to extract every chunk of information.
Amazon Comprehend Medical
Amazon Comprehend Medical (ACM) is Amazon’s solution to this perplexing condition. ACM is a fully managed natural language processing (NLP) service that can analyze and organize data from unstructured medical notes and prescriptions. It can comprehend medical language, differential diagnoses, anatomic terms, medical test reports, treatment options, medication dosage, strength, and frequency from various non-homogenous documents. These features make it easy to find essential stats and correlations of relevant information.
The ACM remarkably transcribes physicians’ handwritten notes, including medical slang and abbreviations, with astonishingly high accuracy. Moreover, according to Amazon, its algorithm is trained to handle the idiosyncrasies of physicians in history taking and prescribing treatments.
Using Amazon Comprehend Medical (ACM) doesn’t need any machine learning expertise. An end-user can access it through an API without the requirement to write complicated rules or train models. Notably, a user just incorporated the unstructured data into Comprehend Medical interface. This data then analyzes the text and extracts relevant medical information and its interlinked relationships into an easy-to-read format, which can then utilize to develop AI-powered applications for prompt diagnosis and better insights that could help physicians make more informed medical decisions. When combined with Amazon Alexa, Amazon Comprehend Medical can also help patients proactively manage their own health, including reminders for their medications and booking a visit to a physician right from home.
Privacy Concerns
Privacy has always been a major concern when it comes to cloud computing and massive data flow through the machine learning system. Amazon Comprehend Medical is a HIPAA compliant system that can detect protected health information (PHI) present in the medical data, including name, registration numbers, family history, and anonymize it to maintain the privacy of the individuals.
Through ACM, the role of Amazon’s AI in healthcare is indisputable to demonstrate how computer science can be used to resolving complex cognitive problems that are generally connected with human intelligence.
Amazon HealthLake
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has recently launched Amazon HealthLake, a HIPAA-compliant platform that allows healthcare organizations to smoothly store, analyze, and transform data in the cloud. Notably, Amazon HealthLake standardizes unstructured clinical data in such a way that unlocks meaningful insights. Cerner, a healthcare IT giant, uses Amazon Web Services as its cloud provider. Cerner’s cloud-based platform named “HealtheDataLab,” hosted on Amazon Web Services, provides medical data to the Children’s Hospital of Orange County researchers for their data science and clinical research work.
Amazon Distance Assistant
Amazon recently deployed a new AI-powered “Distance Assistant” technology for its employees to maintain social distancing. This Amazon Distance Assistant works through a 50-inch monitor, depth sensors, a local computing device, and an AI-enabled camera to track the real-time movements of the employees. When the employees come closer than 6 feet distance to one another, highlighted red circles around their feet alert them that they should move to a safe distance apart, based on deep algorithm models.
Final Words: Amazon Is Going Beyond the Hype
Amazon is almost ready for substantial growth when it comes to healthcare. The company is conducting a wide range of research and increasingly launching more healthcare brands that show its firm commitment. In addition, Amazon has a more pragmatic approach to using AI in healthcare. Its process initiates a concrete problem instead of developing a solution first. As a result, Amazon has practical plans to implement AI correctly and deepens its footprint in the healthcare sector. Indeed, not to mention, Amazon is going beyond the hype in exploring the role of AI and machine learning in healthcare, providing a hopeful expectation to improve services and support using cloud infrastructure to advance efficient patient care.
Related Article: The Application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Medicine