International

Amazon expands HIPAA eligible machine learning

Amazon AWS has announced that Amazon Translate, Amazon Comprehend, and Amazon Transcribe are now U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) eligible services.

Amazon Transcribe is a speech-to-text service that automatically creates text transcripts from audio files will allow healthcare organisations to create text transcripts calls with patients. Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing service that can find insights and relationships in unstructured text. It can analyse sentiment (e.g., negative, positive, and neutral), and extract key phrases from patient interactions to better understand and improve engagement.

Amazon said “By using these services, AWS customers in the healthcare industry can leverage data insights to deliver better outcomes for providers and patients using the power of machine learning (ML). Many healthcare customers are exploring new ways use the power of ML to advance their current workloads and transform how they provide care to patients, all while meeting the requirements of HIPAA.”

Zocdoc, a company that provides medical care search for consumers, uses Amazon SageMaker, a platform that enables developers and data scientists to quickly and easily build, train, and deploy ML models, to expedite the amount of time it takes to match patients and doctors.

“At Zocdoc, our focus has been making it easier for patients to find the right doctor and book an appointment at the most convenient time and location. You can imagine the ML use cases.”

“There is a lot of excitement among Zocdoc engineers around how easy it is to quickly build and deploy a model using Amazon SageMaker. As a matter of fact, one of our mobile engineers was able to train and deploy a doctor specialty recommendation model from scratch in less than a day during a recent Zocdoc Hackathon, which we ended up rolling out to production.”

“Previously, our data science team had to contribute to the development of any model work, which slowed down product teams given that the data science team is a shared resource. With Amazon SageMaker, we could get this from concept to a quick production test much faster, due to the ease of streamlined end-to-end build/deploy/test capabilities of Amazon SageMaker. HIPAA eligibility is a welcome improvement and will allow us to expand its use to improve healthcare experience for our patients.”