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 is meant to help healthcare organizations automate repetitive administrative tasks, including appointment scheduling, documentation, and patient verification, among other things.

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

This move is not the cloud giant’s first in the healthcare space, and it comes at a time when AWS is increasingly looking to grow its footprint in the $5 trillion U.S. healthcare industry. The company launched Amazon Comprehend Medical, a HIPAA-eligible natural language processor for unstructured medical data, in 2018, and it launched Amazon HealthLake in 2021 which is 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 its first major product offering AI agents — software that completes complex tasks on behalf of a human — within a regulatory compliant platform. Amazon Connect Health works with existing clinician software to manage the administrative workflow of providers, like medical history reviews, medical coding, and clinical documentation, the company said.

Amazon Connect Health currently offers patient verification and ambient documentation. Appointment scheduling and patient insights are in preview, and medical coding and other features are set to roll out to customers later.

The software costs $99 a month per user for up to 600 encounters a month — AWS said most primary care physicians have up to 300 encounters a month.

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

Outside of its cloud business, Amazon has made several large moves into the healthcare space in recent years. The retail giant purchased online pharmacy PillPack in 2018 for around $1 billion and primary care company One Medical in 2022 for $3.9 billion. The company has since integrated parts of those businesses into its larger retail and brick-and-mortar operations, including same-day prescription delivery and same-day virtual doctor visits for kids.

Using AI to reduce administrative burden in the healthcare industry — where Amazon Connect Health is focusing — 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 goes through patient data to help reduce administrative burnout. Notable is another startup founded in 2017 that uses AI to reduce burnout by automating intake and scheduling.

Larger AI companies have recently moved quickly into that space.

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