Amazon Comprehend Medical FAQs

General

Amazon Comprehend Medical is a natural language processing service that makes it easy to use machine learning to extract relevant medical information from unstructured text. Using Amazon Comprehend Medical, you can quickly and accurately gather information, such as medical condition, medication, dosage, strength, and frequency from a variety of sources, like doctors’ notes, clinical trial reports, and patient health records.

Amazon Comprehend Medical uses advanced machine learning models to accurately and quickly identify medical information such as medical conditions, and medication, and determine their relationship to each other, for instance, medication and dosage. You access Comprehend Medical through a simple API call, no machine learning expertise is required, no complicated rules to write, and no models to train.

You can use the extracted medical information and their relationships to build applications for use cases, like clinical decision support, revenue cycle management (medical coding), and clinical trial management. Because Comprehend Medical is HIPAA eligible and can quickly identify protected health information (PHI), such as name, age, and medical record number, you can also use it to create applications that securely process, maintain, and transmit PHI.

Please note. When using Amazon Comprehend Medical to identify protected health information, please recall that the service provides confidence scores that indicate the level of confidence in the accuracy of the extracted entities. You should evaluate these confidence scores and identify the right confidence threshold for your use case. For specific compliance use cases, we recommend you use additional human review or other methods to confirm the accuracy of extracted PHI.

Usage

You can get started with Amazon Comprehend Medical from the AWS Management console or using the SDK. Refer to this technical documentation page for details.

Amazon Comprehend Medical provides a free tier so you can test out the service. Refer to this pricing page

No, you don't need NLP expertise to use Amazon Comprehend Medical. You only need to call Amazon Comprehend’s API, and the service will handle the machine learning required to extract the relevant data from the text.

Yes, Amazon Comprehend is continuously trained to make it better for your use cases. Amazon Comprehend Medical does not use customer data used with the service to train the models.

For a list of the supported Amazon Comprehend AWS regions, please visit the AWS Region Table for all AWS global infrastructure.

Amazon Comprehend Medical is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. You and your end users are responsible for exercising your and their own discretion, experience, and judgment in determining the correctness, completeness, timeliness, and suitability of any information provided by Amazon Comprehend Medical. You and your end users are solely responsible for any decisions, advice, actions, and/or inactions based on the use of Amazon Comprehend Medical.

Amazon Comprehend Medical may not accurately identify protected health information in all circumstances, and does not meet the requirements for de-identification of protected health information in accordance with HIPAA. You are responsible for reviewing any output provided by Amazon Comprehend Medical to ensure it meets your needs.

Pricing

Refer to the Amazon Comprehend Medical pricing page to learn more about pricing tiers.

Data privacy and security

Requests to the Amazon Comprehend Medical APIs and console are made over a secure (SSL) connection. You can use AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) to control which IAM users have access to specific Amazon Comprehend Medical actions and resources.

Amazon Comprehend Medical does not use content processed by the service for any reason other than to provide and maintain the service. Content processed by the service is not used to develop or improve the quality of Amazon Comprehend Medical or other Amazon machine-learning/artificial-intelligence technologies, and will not be stored in any AWS region other than the region in which you are using the service. You always retain ownership of your content and we will only use your content with your consent.

Yes, subject to your compliance with the Amazon Comprehend Medical Service Terms, including your obligation to provide any required notices and obtain any required verifiable parental consent under COPPA, you may use Amazon Comprehend Medical in connection with websites, programs, or other applications that are directed or targeted, in whole or in part, to children under age 13.

For information about the requirements of COPPA and guidance for determining whether your website, program, or other application is subject to COPPA, please refer directly to the resources provided and maintained by the United States Federal Trade Commission. This site also contains information regarding how to determine whether a service is directed or targeted, in whole or in part, to children under age 13.