Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that Amazon Textract, a machine learning service that quickly and easily extracts text and data from scanned documents, is now eligible for healthcare workloads that require HIPAA certification. This launch builds upon the existing portfolio of AWS artificial intelligence services that are HIPAA-eligible, including Amazon Translate, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Polly, Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Rekognition – that help deliver better healthcare outcomes.

Healthcare providers routinely extract text and data from documents such as medical records and forms through manual data entry or simple optical character recognition (OCR) software. This is a time-consuming and often inaccurate process that produces outputs requiring extensive post-processing before it can be used by other applications. What organizations want instead is the ability to accurately identify and extract text and data from forms and tables in documents of any format and from a variety of file types and templates.

Amazon Textract analyzes virtually any type of document, automatically generating highly accurate text, form, and table data. Amazon Textract identifies text and data from tables and forms in documents – such as patient information from an insurance claim or values from a table in a scanned medical chart – and recognizes a range of document formats, including those specific to healthcare and insurance, without requiring any customization or human intervention. Amazon Textract makes it easy for customers to accurately process millions of document pages in a matter of hours, significantly lowering document processing costs, and allowing customers to focus on deriving business value from their text and data instead of wasting time and effort on post-processing. Results are delivered via an API that can be easily accessed and used without requiring any machine learning experience.

Starting today, Amazon Textract is now a HIPAA-eligible service, which means healthcare customers can take full advantage of it. Many healthcare customers like Cerner, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and The American Heart Association, are already exploring new ways use the power of ML to automate their current workloads and transform how they provide care to patients, all while meeting the security and privacy requirements required by HIPAA.

Change Healthcare is a leading independent healthcare technology company that provides data and analytics-driven solutions to improve clinical, financial, and patient engagement outcomes in the U.S. healthcare system. “At Change Healthcare, we believe that we can make healthcare affordable and accessible to all by improving the timeliness and quality of financial and administrative decisions.  This can be achieved by the power of machine learning technology to understand more from our data. But unlocking the potential of this information can often be difficult as it’s siloed in tables and forms that traditional optical character recognition hasn’t been able to analyze,” said Nick Giannasi, EVP and Chief AI Officer at Change Healthcare. “Amazon Textract further advances document understanding with the ability to retrieve structured data in addition to text, and now with the service becoming HIPAA eligible, we’ll be able to liberate the information from millions of documents and create even more value for patients, payers, and providers.”

Cambia Health Solutions is a total health solutions company and the parent company of six regional health plans, including Regence, an insurer serving 2.6 million members in Oregon, Idaho, Utah, and Washington. Cambia is transforming the health care system to be more economically sustainable and efficient for people and their families. “Over the past 100 years Cambia has been dedicated to improving health care for people and their families. To help us achieve that goal, we’re always evaluating new innovations and opportunities to optimize care coordination. One area of focus is streamlining administrative processes that are time and labor intensive. We’re excited to explore Amazon Textract to help us automate the process of extracting valuable data from paper forms accurately and efficiently. The powerful combination of data science, A.I., and a person-focused approach is key to our mission of transforming the health care system” said Faraz Shafiq, Cambia Health Solutions Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer.

ClearDATA is a HITRUST certified AWS Managed Service Provider trusted by customers across the globe to safeguard their sensitive data and power their critical applications. Matt Ferrari, Chief Technology Officer at ClearDATA, says “It’s exciting to see AWS add their optical character recognition service powered by machine learning, Amazon Textract, to their list of HIPAA eligible services. A lot of medical data that is shared among payers and providers is locked in image-based files like PDFs. Instead of manually processing that kind of data, healthcare organizations can now use Amazon Textract service to extract medical data from files that previously have been non-machine readable. This brings an opportunity to integrate this data with their electronic health records, or other cloud technologies like Amazon Comprehend Medical that can identify protected health information in the dataset.This is just another step forward in increasing the opportunity to use these emerging technologies to improve access to data, get better insights, lower costs, and improve patient and member experiences”. ClearDATA offers solutions and services that protect healthcare organizations from data privacy risks, improves their data management, and scales their healthcare IT infrastructure, along with one of the most comprehensive Business Associate Agreements in the healthcare industry.

For additional information on Amazon Machine Learning services and how healthcare and life sciences companies can run HIPAA-eligible workloads on AWS please reference the following materials:

• HIPAA Eligible Services Reference
• HIPAA Compliance on AWS
• Architecting for HIPAA Security and Compliance on Amazon Web Services

To get started with Amazon Textract, you can click the “Get Started with Amazon Textract”, button on the Amazon Textract page. You must have an Amazon Web Services account; if you do not already have one, you will be prompted to create one during the process. Once you are signed in to your AWS account, try out Amazon Textract with your own images or PDF documents using the Amazon Textract Management Console. You can also download the Amazon Textract SDKs to start creating your own applications. Please refer to our step-by-step Getting Started Guide for more information.

About the author

Kriti Bharti is the Product Lead for Amazon Textract. Kriti has over 15 years’ experience in Product Management, Program Management, and Technology Management across multiple industries such as Healthcare, Banking and Finance, and Retail. In her time at AWS, she has helped launch a number of new services including AWS IoT Device Management and AWS IoT Device Defender. In her spare time, you can find Kriti having a pawsome time with Fifi and her cousins, reading, or learning different dance forms.