Amazon Web Services revealed Amazon Connect Health on Thursday. This AI-driven platform is designed to assist healthcare organizations in automating repetitive administrative tasks such as appointment scheduling, documentation, and patient verification.
Amazon Connect Health complies with HIPAA regulations and integrates with electronic health record (EHR) systems. It is currently collaborating with EHR software providers, data integrators, and patient engagement firms.
This initiative marks another step in AWS’s expansion into the $5 trillion U.S. healthcare sector. Previously, AWS launched Amazon Comprehend Medical, a HIPAA-compliant natural language processor for unstructured medical data in 2018, followed by Amazon HealthLake in 2021, offering HIPAA-compliant Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) infrastructure for organizing health data. It also introduced HealthOmics, a bioinformatics workflow, in 2022.
It’s AWS’s first significant AI agent product — software that performs complex tasks for humans — within a regulatory-compliant framework. Amazon Connect Health integrates with existing clinical software to handle providers’ administrative tasks, including medical history reviews, medical coding, and clinical documentation.
Amazon Connect Health currently provides patient verification and ambient documentation, with appointment scheduling and patient insights in preview. Medical coding and additional features will be available to customers subsequently.
The platform costs $99 per user per month for up to 600 monthly encounters — AWS notes that most primary care physicians have around 300 monthly encounters.
AWS did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s inquiries for further information on testing and timelines.
Apart from its cloud services, Amazon has made significant strides in healthcare in recent years, including acquiring online pharmacy PillPack in 2018 for approximately $1 billion and primary care provider One Medical in 2022 for $3.9 billion. These acquisitions have been integrated into Amazon’s broader retail and physical operations, such as same-day prescription delivery and virtual doctor visits for children.
Leveraging AI to alleviate administrative duties in healthcare — the focus of Amazon Connect Health — has been a common objective for startups, even before the current AI surge.
For instance, Regard, established in 2017, utilizes AI to document doctors’ notes during consultations and analyze patient data to alleviate administrative exhaustion. Notable, another startup founded the same year, employs AI to automate intake and scheduling.
Recently, larger AI firms have rapidly entered this arena.
In January, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health, a customized version of its chatbot designed to address health inquiries. Soon after, Anthropic introduced Claude for Healthcare, matching OpenAI by offering medical advice to consumers and tools for medical professionals. Both Claude for Healthcare and OpenAI’s enterprise healthcare services support HIPAA-compliant products, whereas ChatGPT Health is not HIPAA-compliant and targets consumers, as confirmed by the companies.