Amazon Web Services Inc. is rolling out a new generative artificial intelligence service, AWS HealthScribe, that can help medical professionals create clinical notes faster.

The service made its debut today at AWS Summit New York. It’s currently available in preview.

As part of their day-to-day work, healthcare practitioners write clinical notes that summarize a patient’s medical condition and related details. The task can take up a significant amount of time. According to AWS, its HealthScribe can automatically generate preliminary clinical notes to free up time for doctors.

“Traditional assistive AI agents have been limited in their ability to understand the context of transcribed conversations,” AWS executives Jason Mark, Sarthak Handa and Tehsin Syed wrote in a blog post today. “By accelerating tasks that were once laborious and time-consuming, generative AI unlocks new opportunities for building assistive tools that free up time for patient care.”

HealthScribe is powered by the cloud giant’s Amazon Bedrock platform. The platform, which received several new features today, provides access to a collection of cloud-based foundation AI models. Some of those models were built by AWS, while others are licensed from startups.

According to the cloud giant, HealthScribe works by analyzing a doctor’s discussion with a patient and automatically transcribing it. The service then segments the transcript into multiple sections. HealthScribe adds metadata to each section that specifies whether it contains medical details or other, lower-priority information.

The service also enhances transcripts in other ways. According to AWS, a speech attribution feature allows HealthScribe to highlight who said what during a medical discussion. For added measure, the service adds a timestamp to each individual word.

HealthScribe uses the transcript it creates to generate a clinical note. The service’s notes summarize key medical information such as a patient’s chief complaint, diagnosis and treatment plan. To help doctors check the text’s accuracy, HealthScribe adds references that link each sentence to the transcript section from which it was generated.

“These summaries are easy to review, edit, and finalize, and can provide quick recap highlights of patient visits to clinicians and scribes,” Mark, Handa and Syed wrote.

The service is available through an application programming interface. Healthcare organizations can use the API to equip their applications with generative AI features. Multiple AWS customers, including primary care provider Babylon Health Inc., are already working to integrate HealthScribe into their software.

HealthScribe is the latest in a series of services that AWS has introduced for the healthcare sector over the past few years. It also offers HealthImaging, a service for processing medical images that became generally available on Tuesday. Earlier, the cloud giant launched a platform called Amazon HealthLake that helps healthcare organizations store and analyze clinical datasets. 

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