Amazon announces new HIPAA eligible machine-learning service

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is continuing its push into the healthcare industry after unveiling its latest HIPAA eligible machine-learning service.

The new machine-learning service, Amazon Comprehend Medical, was introduced in a blog post dated Nov. 27. The service is designed to help developers quickly process and analyze unstructured medical text and identify information like patient diagnosis, symptoms, treatments and dosages.

“Amazon Comprehend Medical allows developers to identify the key common types of medical information automatically, with high accuracy, and without the need for large numbers of custom rules,” Matt Wood, PhD, GM, Deep Learning and AI at AWS, and Taha Kass-Hout, MD, MS, of AWS and former U.S. FDA chief health informatics officer, wrote in the blog post. "Comprehend Medical can identify medical conditions, anatomic terms, medications, details of medical tests, treatments and procedures.”

The hope is that the machine-learning service will improve clinical decision support, streamline revenue cycle and clinical trials management and better address data privacy and protected health information requirements.

The service is also covered under the company’s HIPAA eligibility.

Earlier this month, AWS announced it was expanding its list of HIPAA eligible machine-learning services to include: Amazon Translate, Amazon Transcribed and Amazon Comprehend. Previously, it already had three AI services that were HIPAA eligible: Amazon Polly, Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Rekognition.

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Danielle covers Clinical Innovation & Technology as a senior news writer for TriMed Media. Previously, she worked as a news reporter in northeast Missouri and earned a journalism degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She's also a huge fan of the Chicago Cubs, Bears and Bulls. 

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