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.”

Back to HCB News

Health IT Homepage