Amazon Starts Selling Software To Mine Patient Health Records

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Amazon is starting to sell software to mine patient medical records (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source) for information that doctors and hospitals could use to improve treatment and cut costs, the latest move by a big technology company into the health care industry. The software can read digitized patient records and other clinical notes, analyze them and pluck out key data points, Amazon says. The company is expected to announce the launch Tuesday. Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud-computing division, has been selling such text-analysis software to companies outside medicine for use in areas such as travel booking, customer support and supply-chain management. The technology's health-care application is the newest effort by Amazon to tap into the lucrative market.

Amazon officials say the company's software developers trained the system using a process known as deep learning to recognize all the ways a doctor might record notes. 'We're able to completely, automatically look inside medical language and identify patient details,' including diagnoses, treatments, dosage and strengths, 'with incredibly high accuracy,' said Matt Wood, general manager of artificial intelligence at Amazon Web Services. During testing, the software performed on par or better than other published efforts, and can extract data on patients' diseases, prescriptions, lab orders and procedures, said Taha Kass-Hout, a senior leader with Amazon's health-care and artificial intelligence efforts. The project is called Amazon Comprehend Medical, which 'allows developers to process unstructured medical text and identify information such as patient diagnosis, treatments, dosages, symptoms and signs, and more,' according to a blog post. Dr. Kass-Hout says Amazon Web Services won't see the data processed by its algorithms, 'which will be encrypted and unlocked by customers who have the key,' reports WSJ.

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