Amazon Web Services announced the availability of Amazon Transcribe Medical, a new speech recognition capability of Amazon Transcribe, designed to convert clinician and patient speech to text. According to Amazon’s announcement, Amazon Transcribe Medical makes it easy for developers to integrate medical transcription into applications that help physicians do clinical documentation efficiently. It can “automatically and accurately” transcribe physicians’ dictations, as well as their conversations with patients, into text. Moreover, the service enables automatic punctuation and capitalization, allowing physicians to speak naturally when transcribing voice notes. 

At launch, Amazon Transcribe Medical is HIPAA eligible, and offers an API that can integrate with voice-enabled applications and any device with a microphone. Output transcripts will support word-level time stamps and confidence scores. Users can call the API to open a secure connection over WebSocket protocol and start passing a stream of audio to the service. In return, users receive a stream of text in real time. The raw text can be pumped into downstream text analytics services, Amazon Comprehend Medical, to extract medical insights.

Voice solutions built on top of Amazon Transcribe Medical will be able to help produce accurate medical transcripts of dictation and conversational speech in the medical domain, according to the company. In clinical documentation workflow, “physicians can more efficiently capture medical notes without distraction during patient engagements.” Moreover, Amazon’s announcement says, physicians can leverage the transcribed notes after patient encounters to more quickly conduct medical data entry into electronic health record (EHR) systems.

To learn more about Amazon Transcribe medical, visit this page or see the technical documentation.

In an email to Hearing Review, Lux Research analyst Nardev Ramanathan said, “This system not only allows doctors to dictate into the system, but it can also passively be set to monitor doctor-patient interactions. Google has also been innovating in this space, launching its own EHR documentation tool that aims to make it easier for doctors to search for a variety of metrics and notes. These developments will transform the doctor-patient experience, freeing up more time for the doctor to be fully immersed in the provision of care, as opposed to being bogged down with administrative tasks. However, it is important to also monitor how these technologies are implemented, as extreme accuracy in medical documentation is critical.”

Source: Amazon, Lux Research