admin Amazon announced at its AWS re:Invent conference that the company is expanding its automatic transcription service for AWS, Amazon Transcribe, to include support for medical speech. Amazon stated that the new service ‘Amazon Transcribe Medical will’ allow physicians to quickly dictate their clinical notes and speech into accurate text in real time, without any human intervention.
Unlike some services, the physicians won’t have to say things like “comma” or “full stop,” but can speak normally during the dictation process. The text can then be fed to downstream systems, including ER systems or AWS language services, like Amazon Comprehend Medical for entity extraction.
Doctors will soon be able to dictate things to their computer and have the dictation be transcribed into written content, full medical thesaurus included, courtesy of Amazon.
The doctors will first record audio through a microphone and send the PCM audio to a streaming API on the WebSocket protocol. The API will return a JSON blob which includes the transcribed text, word-level time stamps and punctuation.
Users will also have the option of storing the text to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).
According to Amazon, doctors and other users will not need to dictate things like punctuation – they’ll just need to talk as they usually do. Being HIPAA eligible means the service would be fully scalable, doctors will get to use it only in amounts needed, with no upfront fees.
Voice solutions built on top of Amazon Transcribe Medical will be able to produce accurate medical transcripts of dictation and conversational speech in the medical domain. In clinical documentation workflow, physicians can more efficiently capture medical notes without distraction during patient engagements. Moreover, physicians can leverage the transcribed notes after patient encounters to more quickly conduct medical data entry into electronic health record (EHR) systems. This culminates into a better experience for physicians who save valuable time, and also a higher patient satisfaction and care overall.
Amazon is increasingly investing in the healthcare industry, and Transcribe Medical is just the latest in a string of moves. The company recently launched a medication management tool for Alexa, allowing users to request refills and set medication reminders via voice. However, it’s not alone in the space, as Google is tapping into the market with Google Brain as well. Microsoft and Philips also have a strong presence in the industry.
Magazine 
