AWS for Industries

Huron transforms patient experience and business operations with AWS generative AI analytics

This blog is co-written with Shane O’Connor and Kendra Burkholder from Huron.

Healthcare providers that are innovative are always striving to deliver exceptional patient experiences while optimizing business operations for speed and cost. Huron Consulting Group (Huron) has developed innovative solutions using the generative AI built on AWS. They are transforming how healthcare providers measure and improve patient satisfaction, and business performance.

Revolutionizing patient experience measurement

The Huron Intelligence® Rounding platform provides a breakthrough in healthcare analytics by leveraging Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Nova, and Amazon Redshift to deliver in the moment sentiment analysis of clinician to patient interactions. The solution achieves 90% accuracy in analyzing millions of patient interactions. Providing unprecedented visibility into patient experience measurement directly impacting hospital funding through Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) scores.

“The beauty of the solution is not that it’s groundbreaking or technically complex, but that it’s so easy to realize business value with AWS [Amazon Web Services],” notes Gleb Jegaline, Lead Architect at Huron. “The solution goes beyond basic sentiment categorization to deliver nuanced insights that enable immediate staff coaching and development opportunities.”

Uncover hidden opportunities in business operations

The solution analyzes text within business work drivers to:

  • Identify breakdowns in claims processing
  • Provide root cause analysis of denials and write-offs
  • Find opportunities to improve payer communications

“Partnering with AWS gave us access to all the tools and services we needed to deliver a robust, end-to-end solution for our customers. We have been impressed by the performance of the Amazon Nova models and are happy with the guidance from our AWS team,” states Rob Neild, Principal Software Architect at Huron.

Driving measurable business impact

The implementation has delivered significant results:

  • Achieved sentiment analysis with 90% accuracy across patient interactions
  • Immediate identification of patient satisfaction trends enabling proactive interventions
  • Direct impact on hospital revenue through optimized HCAHPS funding
  • Scalable deployment across healthcare providers, with expansion from 11 to over 100 healthcare organizations planned by January 2026

Technical architecture

The solution integrates three powerful AWS services:

  1. Amazon Bedrock: Provides the platform for building generative AI applications and agents.
  2. Amazon Nova: Fast and cost-effective foundation models for text and multimodal needs. Nova Enables sophisticated sentiment analysis and insight generation.
  3. Amazon Redshift: Cloud data warehouse that uses ML to deliver the best price performance at any scale. Redshift Facilitates efficient data processing and analysis at scale

The architecture leverages a three-stage workflow for patient interaction analysis. Initially, data from patient interactions is ingested through Amazon EventBridge, which triggers AWS Step Functions to coordinate the processing pipeline. In the sentiment analysis stage, Amazon Nova models on Amazon Bedrock work together to analyze the text content, extracting sentiment and key insights with 90% accuracy. The processed data then flows into Amazon Redshift for historical storage and analytics. This enables both real-time sentiment analysis and historical backfill capabilities. The solution includes two primary data flows: one for immediate sentiment processing of new interactions, and another for batch processing of historical data. Both streams ultimately feed into dashboards that provide actionable insights for healthcare staff and administrators, enabling proactive patient experience management.

Future innovation

Huron is expanding the platform’s capabilities to include:

  • Additional Rounding related generative AI insights
  • Real-time voice transcription and analysis in clinical settings, including in the moment sentiment analysis
  • Integration with revenue cycle analytics
  • Enhanced staff coaching opportunities and development tools
  • Cross-functional application with other Huron products

“When we talk with our clients about where they focus their efforts, it’s around delivery of care and on-going research to continue providing that level of care,” says Josh Youravish, Hosting Manager on the Digital Products DevOps team at Huron. “In working with AWS and leveraging their generative AI capabilities, we are helping our clients continue to provide the top tier patient experiences their patients need, while optimizing and modernizing their operations.”

Conclusion

The success of this implementation highlights an effective use of generative AI in healthcare, demonstrating how AWS services can be integrated to create solutions that deliver immediate business value and improve patient care outcomes. For organizations seeking to enhance their patient experience measurement and operational efficiency, the approach used by Huron serves as a blueprint for leveraging the generative AI capabilities of AWS to drive meaningful transformation.

Contact an AWS Representative to learn how we can help accelerate your business.

Further reading

Shane O’Connor

Shane O’Connor

Shane a Sr. Director of Healthcare Analytics , Huron Consulting, based in Columbus, Ohio. Shane is passionate about helping clients mature their analytics and AI strategies, and solving problems at the intersection of disparate data domains. Shane enjoys travel with his family and as live music of all varieties.

Derek Murrow

Derek Murrow

Derek is a Senior Account Manager based in Denver, Colorado. Derek is passionate about deeply understanding his clients business objectives and helping them solve problems with technology innovation. In his free time, Derek enjoys spending time with his family, participating in endurance events, coaching cycling athletes, baking sourdough bread, and exploring the Colorado backcountry on skis.

Kendra Burkholder

Kendra Burkholder

Kendra is a Senior Manager at Huron, where she leads product strategy and innovation focused on helping healthcare organizations strengthen patient experience, employee engagement, and operational performance. With deep expertise in healthcare technology and workflow optimization, Kendra partners closely with clinical and operational leaders to design solutions that make purposeful rounding more actionable, measurable, and impactful

Kiran Lakkireddy

Kiran Lakkireddy

Kiran is a Principal Solutions Architect at AWS, specializing in Enterprise AI including Generative AI and Agentic AI. He brings deep expertise across Financial Services, Benefits Management, and HR Services, guiding enterprise customers through complex business and technology transformations. Kiran focuses on AI security, compliance, and governance, regularly advising customer security leadership on responsible Enterprise AI strategies. He helps organizations safely unlock the transformative potential of Generative and Agentic AI while upholding the highest standards of security and ethical AI practice.

Sudhir Schar

Sudhir Schar

Sudhir is a Sr. Customer Solutions Manager at AWS, accelerating GenAI adoption and Agentic AI implementations for Agriculture, Consulting Services, and Hi-Tech enterprises. As an EBA ambassador, he partners with C-suite leaders to align AI-powered transformation strategies with measurable business outcomes. In his free time, Sudhir enjoys playing the violin, mentoring high school students in STEM and fine arts, and exploring new ways to inspire the next generation of innovators.