During the re:Invent cloud conference, Amazon Web Services launched a range of new services. Another new feature is a service that allows healthcare providers to analyse medical records so that they can improve patient care and reduce costs.
The new AWS product has been christened Amazon Comprehend Medical and uses machine learning. According to AWS, it is a machine learning service that allows developers to process unstructured medical texts and identify information, including diagnoses, treatments, dosages, symptoms and more.
Improve treatment
Amazon Comprehend Medical should be able to identify medical conditions, anatomical terms, medications, details of medical trials, treatments and procedures from a range of different documents. Using AWS’ artificial intelligence, ACM can analyze and scan documents and photos for relevant data that medical professionals can then use for proper medical treatment.
In a blog, AWS writes that most patient data is still stored as unstructured text. These include notes, prescriptions, transcripts of conversations, pathological and radiological reports and more. Identifying this information is a manual and time-consuming process, according to AWS.
Better treatment
According to the company, this process of processing currently requires well-trained medical experts, or developers who have to write their own code in order to then search for relevant information. In both cases there is time for something other than treating a patient.
In order to change this, AWS has come up with this technology. ACM can also analyse doctors’ notes. The platform has already been tested by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle before it was given the green light to launch. This would have helped to identify patients who might be able to take part in experiments on new drugs.
Incidentally, this is not the only step that Amazon is taking in the medical industry. Last June it already took over the startup PillPack. And it works with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase to provide healthcare.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.
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