Amazon is making a new bet on AI healthcare, competing with Microsoft in the doctor’s office
Amazon Web Services is expanding into healthcare AI, introducing a new agent system that can handle patient calls, document clinic visits and automate billing codes.
Amazon Connect Health, announced Thursday morning, is the first industry-specific extension of the Amazon Connect system for call centers, which passed the $1 billion annual revenue milestone last year.
It will compete in part with rival Microsoft, which acquired Nuance for $19.7 billion in 2022 and has embedded its DAX Copilot documentation tool into large health record systems. AI startup authors have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to enable clinical documentation.
Amazon features Amazon Connect Health as a comprehensive solution that encompasses the entire healthcare workflow, from the first call through the post-visit billing code.
The idea is to “not just offer point solutions, targeting tools, or a set of skills, but think ultimately about what the customer’s problem is, and how we can solve it,” said Rajiv Chopra, AWS’s vice president of Health AI and Life Sciences, in a speech this week.
Early adopters of the technology include UC San Diego Health, which handles 3.2 million patient interactions annually; One Medical, a primary care practice owned by Amazon that used the power of ambient text during one million visits; and Netsmart, which provides EHR software to more than 1,300 community-based health care organizations.
Amazon’s move could double as a litmus test for AI adoption in healthcare, where institutions have traditionally been slow to adopt new technologies.
A randomized trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine AI in December found that ambient AI documentation (AI startup Abridge) reduced physician burnout and reduced documentation time by 30 minutes per day per provider. However, hospitals continue to cite concerns about data privacy, difficulty integrating AI tools into existing workflows, and unclear return on investment.
Amazon’s new product has five basic capabilities: automatic patient verification, intelligent scheduling of appointments, pre-visit summaries of doctors’ visits, ambient documentation that writes and draws clinical notes during visits, and automatic medical coding for payment.
It integrates natively with Epic, the largest US electronic health record system, with more EHR partners to follow. It also connects to AWS HealthLake, Amazon’s cloud-based health data warehouse, which gets new agent capabilities to convert records into standard formats.
Amazon Connect Health comes from AWS’s Applied AI Solutions group, led by Senior Vice President Colleen Aubrey, which focuses on building end-to-end applications for specific industries rather than selling raw cloud infrastructure and tools to developers.
Aubrey, who built Amazon’s advertising business, said at AWS re:Invent in December that his team is putting “agent AI at the heart of everything we do,” describing the technology as “AI teammates” that can work independently on behalf of businesses.
Healthcare is the first direct recipient of a purpose-built Connect product, but Aubrey indicated that more is in the works. Separately, the group oversees Amazon’s Just Walk Out sales technology and develops agent AI tools for supply chain planning and life sciences.
Amazon Connect Health is available in preview starting Thursday.
