Dive Brief:
- Amazon Web Services rolled out a suite of agentic artificial intelligence tools Thursday that aim to handle a range of healthcare tasks, like helping patients schedule appointments and summarizing medical data for clinicians. The product, called Amazon Connect Health, includes five capabilities: verifying patients’ identities; handling appointment scheduling; creating summaries of patient medical histories; creating clinical notes based on conversations between clinicians and patients; and generating medical codes from clinical documentation.
- Amazon Connect Health should help patients more easily access care and assist with clinicians’ administrative work, according to Naji Shafi, general manager and director of healthcare AI at AWS. “Our healthcare workers are overburdened, drowning in administrative complexity, and it’s costing everyone,” he said.
Dive Insight:
The agents — AI systems that can act more autonomously and handle complex tasks — include functionality geared toward patient engagement as well as tools to help providers prepare for appointments and document care, according to AWS.
The patient-facing agents are focused on assisting patients as they schedule appointments with providers on the phone, Shafi said. For example, a patient could call and ask to see a specific doctor about knee pain, and the tool could confirm the patient’s identity, check their insurance, review their doctor’s availability and schedule the visit.
Health systems can customize their patient verification requirements and appointment scheduling capabilities based on their preferences. For instance, a provider might want the tool to only schedule an appointment if the patient’s insurer has approved a prior authorization request for an expensive service, Shafi said.
The scheduling tool is also trained on examples of frustrated patients and complex cases, so the agent can route these calls to a person if necessary, he added. Additionally, if a caller says they want to speak to a human, the tool sends the conversation to a human worker.
“If I’m getting frustrated, our AI agent will detect that, automatically escalate and bring in a human, and all that context will carry over,” he said.
Amazon Connect Health also includes functionality geared toward providers. One tool synthesizes patients’ medical histories from electronic health record data and health information exchanges, so clinicians don’t have to dig through charts to find relevant information, AWS said.
Additionally, the suite of tools includes an ambient documentation assistant, which generates clinical notes after recording conversations between providers and patients. The offering builds on Amazon’s HealthScribe tool, launched in 2023, by adding the ability to automatically populate after-visit summaries and suggest diagnosis and billing codes, according to AWS.
The provider tools also include guardrails — a key concern for experts who worry about inaccurate or misleading responses that could cause patient harm.
A human clinician needs to review documentation and codes before they’re approved, Shafi said. And any time the AI is summarizing information or taking an action, users can see the source information for the suggestion.
Strong evaluation of the models is key too, Shafi said. AWS uses clinicians on staff to analyze AI outputs, and the company has also built what it calls a “large language model as a judge” — a separate AI that can critique other models.
“We’ve built it up so it’s highly correlated to humans,” Shafi said. “So that enables us to have a secondary system that is looking at the model outputs, and it’s trying to say, ‘Well, is this right? Is this good? Is this accurate?’”
