It’s becoming harder to remember, but Amazon once was simply an online book seller. Then, the company moved into other retail items. Then, it transformed into one of the leading retail giants of our time. They’ve since revolutionized supply chain and delivery systems, bought Whole Foods and moved into the grocery business.
Now, Amazon is moving into health informatics.
The company announced in late 2018 that Amazon Comprehend Medical, their machine learning software that can extract information from unstructured data such as doctor’s notes, is available for use by healthcare organizations. The service is part of Amazon Web Services (AWS), widely known for its cloud computing capabilities.
The announcement represents a leap forward in health informatics, where dealing with unstructured data when putting together a patient’s electronic medical record has been an ongoing issue.
What Amazon Comprehend Medical Does
As pointed out by Amazon on the Amazon Comprehend Medical page, a longstanding issue in health informatics is that some information gets trapped – that is, hard to enter into medical records – because it is in “free-form medical text, including hospital admission notes and a patient’s medical history.”
The Amazon system is designed to use machine learning to unlock that data from all available sources – including clinical trial reports and doctors’ notes – to supply accurate information to health professionals quickly.
Amazon says this is accomplished by software that can that can “reliably understand the medical information in unstructured text, identify meaningful relationships, and improve over time.”
It’s basically cloud computing and analytics focused on health informatics. Healthcare operations don’t have to manage a server, they simply send the unstructured data to Amazon. This could be a way to both improve patient care and make healthcare operations more efficient.
Other Amazon Forays into Healthcare
The latest announcement is the first of many in the past year. Becker’s Hospital Review compiled a rundown of what Amazon has been doing in healthcare. It includes the following.
- Partnering with Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan Chase to create an independent company that will lower healthcare costs for their U.S. employees.
- Expanding its medical supplies business
- Launching Basic Care, which includes about 60 over-the-counter healthcare products
- Hiring former federal Food and Drug Administration Chief Health Informatics Officer Taha Kasshout to the company’s healthcare team, called Grand Challenge
- Working on several projects through Grand Challenge, including research into cancer prevention and cures and healthcare services for the elderly
- Purchasing online pharmacy company PillPack
It would seem that Amazon is as serious about moving into healthcare as it was about moving into the grocery space with the Whole Foods purchase. With advanced technology on their side – including a recently patented delivery drone that responds to human gestures – Amazon is seen as a potential leader in healthcare, especially when it comes to cost savings.
Embracing Informatics
Anything Amazon does is watched closely due to the company’s success in past endeavors. Most see Amazon’s move as a big benefit for healthcare.
It could also go a long way toward getting healthcare operations to embrace new technology and practices that come with it. As with almost every industry, collecting the information is now relatively easy. But issues such as unstructured data and errors in coding have created challenges in leveraging that data to improve healthcare for patients. And security is often an issue with outside vendors.
Amazon claims its system is secure and even compliant with the new European GDPR standards. The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center already is using the system for clinical trials. The center’s chief information officer told MedCity News that developing clinical trials typically takes the time to go through “mountains” of unstructured data.
“Amazon Comprehend Medical will reduce this time burden from hours to seconds,” he said.
Where can it go from here? Much depends on how well the system works at Fred Hutchinson as well as Deloitte and PricewaterhouseCoopers, which are also using the system.
One possibility is Amazon moving strongly into prescription drug delivery. If the PillPack purchase works as planned, it may change how people order and manage their prescription drugs. It’s also reasonable to expect competing systems to be developed by other companies – which also could be good for consumers.
However, healthcare executives are increasingly concerned about tech giants having an increased interest in their business. A survey by the Center for Connected Medicine found that seven in 10 healthcare executives are somewhat concerned, while 10% are “very concerned.”
