Amazon Web services has unveiled a generative AI tool for doctors called “HealthScribe.” Its goal is to help doctors and clinicians take better notes during patient visits. Yahoo Finance Health Care Reporter Anjalee Khamlani explains how it works.
Video Transcript
– A lot of news, a lot of headlines coming out of your industry there– the health care space. Also, AWS pushing further into the health care space. What can you tell us about this new tool, medical tool, that they’re rolling out for doctors?
ANJALEE KHAMLANI: So it basically is going to help doctors take better notes when they’re in patient visits. And this is not new technology. So in some respect, they’re kind of late to the market there. But what they do have that’s different and is not as widely available is the ability to auto summarize, highlight medications, highlight medical terms and the like to make doctors’ lives and clinicians’ lives a lot easier.
It does still require, of course, a set of human eyes to overlook. We know that that’s big in the health care space, making sure to cut down on any potential negative outcomes or impacts to patients. So the HealthScribe, as it’s been dubbed, is taking the place of scribes. And so what scribes have been over the years is basically a person who follows the doctor around.
Typically, you see this in the emergency room. They make sure to take notes in patient charts. There’s also tele-scribes from some companies, where a scribe is listening in virtually. So this just kind of gets rid of the human element of it as an additional cost. There have been estimates out there that a human scribe costs anywhere between $30,000 to $50,000.
And so this could be a little bit more cost-effective and efficient when it comes to scaling it to other specialties outside of the ER. So that’s where AWS is pushing in. It’s separate, of course, from the Amazon health efforts that we generally talk about. But it’s just another way that AWS is supporting that. They do have other similar types of tools out there for doctors now. So it’s just getting into a really competitive space with big tech and health right now.
– It’s certainly something that I have a feeling we’re going to hear a little bit more about going forward here, right? Anjalee Khamlani, thanks so much.
