AWS Machine Learning Blog

Amazon Textract is now HIPAA eligible

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that Amazon Textract, a machine learning service that quickly and easily extracts text and data from forms and tables in scanned documents, is now eligible for healthcare and life science workloads that require HIPAA compliance. 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 customers retrieve data from documents more accurately to reach better healthcare decisions, operate more efficiently, and help identify medical and scientific trends.

Critical healthcare information often lies within documents such as medical records and forms. Healthcare and life science organizations need to access data that is locked inside those documents in order to fulfil medical claims, streamline administrative processes, and process electronic health records. They routinely extract text and data from documents through manual data entry or simple optical character recognition (OCR) software. This is a time-consuming and often inaccurate process that requires extensive pre-processing, such as creating custom templates for each unique document type, and extensive post-processing from human reviewers. What we’ve learned from our customers, is they instead want the ability to quickly, easily, and accurately retrieve text and data from forms and tables in a wide variety of documents. Amazon Textract analyzes virtually any type of document – such as patient information from an insurance claim or values from a table in a scanned medical chart – without requiring customization or human intervention. Amazon Textract makes it easy for healthcare and life sciences customers to accurately process millions of pages in a matter of hours. That significantly lowers document processing costs, and allows customers to focus on deriving clinical value from their documents instead of wasting time and effort on pre-processing and 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 and life science customers can take full advantage of it. Many healthcare and life sciences customers like The American Heart Association, Celgene, Cerner, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and Takeda are already exploring new ways to use the power of machine learning to automate their current workloads and transform how they provide care to patients, and develop, trial, manufacture, and commercialize therapeutics, 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 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 (EHR), or other cloud technologies like Amazon Comprehend Medical which can identify protected health information (PHI) 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:

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.