Alexa may one day help patients keep their daily med routine on track – and more.

Online giant Amazon is developing a new service to provide better clinical decision support to health care providers, insurers, researchers, and clinical trial investigators as well as healthcare IT, biotech, and pharmaceutical companies.

“We are excited to announce Amazon Comprehend Medical, a new HIPAA-eligible machine learning service that allows developers to process unstructured medical text and identify information such as patient diagnosis, treatments, dosages, symptoms and signs,” Dr. Taha A. Kass-Hout and Dr. Matt Wood wrote on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Machine Learning Blog.

More than just a better way to ensure patient compliance with drug regimens, the system is expected to help streamline revenue cycle and clinical trials management, while more efficiently addressing data privacy and protected health information requirements. These capabilities are predicted to make it a top competitor with solutions produced by other organizations such as IBM’s Watson Health and Optum from United Health Group, according to an AMA report.

Its creation furthers the objective to turn health records into “big data”, thereby doing away with the challenge of converting most health and patient information today, which comprises so-called “unstructured medical text”, into AI usable form.

Converting this information, which consists of doctor's notes, prescriptions, transcripts of interviews, and pathology and radiology reports, is too laborious to do by hand – a task made even more costly by the need to employ skilled medical experts to enter it into a system – or create custom software to tackle it.

Amazon Comprehend Medical spots key information “automatically, with high accuracy, and without the need for large numbers of custom rules,” said Kass-Hout. “Ultimately, this richness of information may be able to one day help consumers with managing their own health, including medication management, proactively scheduling care visits, or empowering them to make informed decisions about their health and eligibility," she said, along with Wood.

In addition, the system needs no onsite servers, and can read and return texts of medical information sent to it, requiring no models for training or machine learning experience from users. Another plus is privacy – no data is kept on the service or used for training.

The system is currently being previewed by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle to identify patients for clinical trials. The center has already evaluated millions of clinical notes to extract and index medical conditions, medications, and choice of cancer therapeutic options, thereby reducing processing time of each document from hours to seconds.

“Curing cancer is, inherently, an issue of time,” Hutchinson's chief information officer Matthew Trunnell noted on the Amazon blog site, adding that “the process of developing clinical trials and connecting them with the right patients requires research teams to sift through and label mountains of unstructured medical record data."

Cutting down that time, he stresses, is an important step in providing researchers rapid access to the information they need when they need it, so that they can find actionable insights that advance lifesaving therapies for patients.

The system is also being previewed by Roche Diagnostics. “With petabytes of unstructured data being generated in hospital systems every day, our goal is to take this information and convert it into useful insights that can be efficiently accessed and understood,” said Anish Kejariwal, director of software engineering for Roche Diagnostics Information Solutions, advising that the Amazon system helps speed the process and “provides the functionality to help us with quickly extracting and structuring information from medical documents" to build a comprehensive, longitudinal view of patients, and enable both decision support and population analytics.

This latest offering by Amazon aligns with its other recent forays into the healthcare space, tacking on natural language to the Alexa space, so that doctors can use the device to monitor patients and patients can update their healthcare providers in a near-automatic fashion. This includes keeping tabs on medicine use, health metrics and the like that could bring together everything from wearables to electronic health records.

It also follows the January announcement that Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase were teaming up to form an independent company that will tackle the task of improving their employer-covered healthcare.

Their aim is to enhance "ways to address healthcare for their U.S. employees, with the aim of improving employee satisfaction and reducing costs,” the trio announced at the time. “Hard as it might be, reducing healthcare’s burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort. Success is going to require talented experts, a beginner’s mind, and a long-term orientation.”