Health Tech

Is Amazon’s Approach With HealthScribe Favoring Collaboration Over Competition Smart?

Amazon recently unveiled HealthScribe, an API that software companies can use to create clinical note generation apps that providers can later adopt. With this approach, Amazon is seeking to collaborate with companies that are building clinical documentation AI apps rather than compete with them. Some think this approach is clever, but others think it does little to facilitate bi-directional EHR integration and create standardization.

By Katie Adams on July 31, 2023

Tech companies small and large have bet on AI relieving administrative burden and clinician burnout — think Microsoft’s Nuance and smaller startups like Suki and Notable.

But with Amazon‘s entry into the space last week with its HealthScribe solution, the race’s contours have shifted. Instead of going directly to hospitals with its own solution like a Nuance or Suki, Amazon’s take is slightly different, said Yuanling Yuan, principal at SignalFire. Seattle-based Amazon is creating an API that can help both itself and external developers/startups build and scale generative AI to address the burden of clinical documentation. Not everyone, however, believes this approach will work.

Yuan said that clinical documentation startup Health Note — one of SignalFire’s portfolio companies — has been exploring potential partnership opportunities with HealthScribe but would see Suki or Nuance as its competitors.

Despite their different approaches, having well-known companies jump into the field of clinical documentation is a good sign for tired clinicians.

“The U.S. population would benefit tremendously from mainstream adoption of these autonomous clinical workflow tools, like scribing, as it will rebalance the amount of a physician’s time available for seeing patients,” Yuan explained. “If it takes tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon to help the industry cross the chasm, then I see HealthScribe as a positive step in the right direction.”

HealthScribe’s AI capabilities are powered by Bedrock, a platform Amazon designed to help itself, as well as external startups, build and scale generative AI products. The idea behind HealthScribe is that healthcare software companies will use its AI capabilities to create clinical note generation apps that providers can later adopt to streamline the documentation process.

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Healthcare software providers can use the API to generate transcripts from patient-clinician interactions. These transcripts identify speaker roles and break the conversation up into categories, such as small talk, subjective comments and objective statements. The transcripts also extract key details, such as medications, diagnoses and advice for follow-up care. 

Amazon said that HealthScribe makes it easier and faster for healthcare software providers to integrate generative AI capabilities into their products because they don’t need to manage the underlying machine learning infrastructure or train their own large language models. 3M Health Information Systems, Babylon Health and ScribeEMR are the first three companies that will be using HealthScribe to build generative AI apps, according to Amazon’s press release.

“Amazon HealthScribe’s bet is that they would rise with the tide of all the health tech software vendors trying to address these documentation challenges versus competing directly, which can be a clever strategy as the switching costs of a hospital already using a vendor like 3M, reportedly one of HealthScribe’s first customers, is typically very high,” she declared. 

While Amazon’s approach is different from many other companies in the clinical documentation AI space, there are still some doubts about whether HealthScribe will be successful in tackling the physician burnout problem.

Ian Shakil, founder of ambient medical documentation firm Augmedix, described HealthScribe as “Lego bricks for others to build an end product” in a recent tweet. He pointed out that these Lego bricks do little to facilitate bi-directional EHR integration, create standardization across provider types and specialties, or provide a framework for return on investment.

Shakil’s tweet highlighted the fact that HealthScribe has no provider customers, so it’s difficult to predict whether the API will be able to create meaningful change when it comes to offloading clinicians’ administrative burden.

Stakeholders will have to wait and see whether the healthcare technology companies using HealthScribe will be able to create and deploy solutions that can help alleviate providers’ burnout. If they end up unsuccessful, it will be interesting to see whether Amazon pivots or scraps the project entirely. In the last three years, Amazon has shuttered three of its healthcare divisions — its Halo wearables unit, its hybrid primary and urgent care business Amazon Care, and Haven, its joint venture with JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway.

Photo: Flickr, Cerillion Skyline