Amazon Adds Speech-to-Text and More to HIPAA-Eligible Services

Amazon Web Services is continuing its rapid push into health care by adding three more HIPAA-eligible services to its machine-learning tools, including a speech-to-text offering that that will automatically create transcripts from provider-to-patient calls. AWS also has added Amazon Translate, a neural machine translation service to help doctors and patients communicate regardless of language barriers. Meanwhile, a new natural language processing service called Amazon Comprehend analyzes text of patient-provider conversations to home in on key phrases to improve future patient interactions.

The new products, according to a report in HIMSS's MobiHealthNews, cater to a variety of health needs and are designed to improve management and patient engagement.

In a recent blog, Vasi Philomin, GM for machine learning and artificial intelligence at AWS, says the services also will enable covered entities and their business associates subject to HIPAA to use AWS's secure environment to leverage data insights to deliver better outcomes. He adds that health care companies such as NextGen Healthcare, Omada Health, Verge Health and Orion Health already are running HIPAA workloads on AWS to analyze numerous patient records.

Earlier, AWS launched two other HIPAA-eligible services, including:

• Amazon Sagemaker, a platform that enables developers and data scientists to quickly and easily build, train and deploy machine-learning models to shorten the time it takes to match patients and doctors.
• Amazon Polly is a cloud service that turns text into lifelike speech, using deep learning to provide telecom solutions for their major health care clients.