AWS launches a new AI agent platform specifically for healthcare

Amazon Web Services announced Thursday the launch of Amazon Connect Health. This AI agent-powered platform aims to help healthcare organizations automate repetitive administrative tasks including appointment scheduling, documentation, and patient verification, among others.

Amazon Connect Health is HIPAA eligible and connects to electronic health record (EHR) software. The platform currently works with EHR software vendors, data integrators and patient engagement companies, the company said.

The move is not the healthcare cloud giant’s first, and comes at a time when AWS is increasingly looking to expand its footprint in the $5 trillion US healthcare sector. The company in 2018 launched Amazon Comprehend Medical, a HIPAA-eligible natural language processor for unstructured medical data, and in 2021 it launched Amazon HealthLake, a HIPAA-eligible Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) infrastructure used to organize health data. The company also launched HealthOmics, a bioinformatics workflow, in 2022.

Still, it is the first major product to offer AI agents – software that performs complex tasks on behalf of a human – within a regulatory-compliant platform. Amazon Connect Health works with existing physician software to manage healthcare providers’ administrative workflow, such as medical history reviews, medical coding and clinical documentation, the company said.

Amazon Connect Health currently offers patient authentication and environmental documentation. Appointment scheduling and patient insights are in preview, and medical coding and other features will be rolled out to customers later.

The software costs $99 per month per user for up to 600 meetings per month. According to AWS, most primary care physicians have up to 300 encounters per month.

A spokesperson for Amazon Web Services did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s requests for additional information on testing and timeline.

Beyond its cloud business, Amazon has made several big moves in healthcare in recent years. The retail giant bought online pharmacy PillPack in 2018 for about $1 billion and primary care company One Medical in 2022 for $3.9 billion. The company has since integrated parts of these businesses into its larger retail and brick-and-mortar operations, including same-day prescription delivery and same-day virtual doctor visits for children.

Using AI to reduce administrative burdens in healthcare – which is the focus of Amazon Connect Health – has been a popular target for startups even before the current AI wave.

For example, Regard, founded in 2017, uses AI to take notes for doctors during sessions and uses patient data to help reduce administrative burnout. Remarkable is another startup founded in 2017 that uses AI to reduce burnout by automating intake and scheduling.

Larger AI companies have quickly moved into that space recently.

In January, OpenAI released ChatGPT Health, a version of its chatbot tailored to answering health questions. Anthropic announced its own healthcare-focused product, Claude for Healthcare, just a week later. Like OpenAI’s product, Claude for Healthcare provides medical advice to consumers, but like Amazon Connect Health, it also includes tools for medical professionals. Claude for healthcare and OpenAIs corporate healthcare services are built to work with HIPAA compliant products, while ChatGPT Health is consumer-facing and not HIPAA compliant, according to the companies.