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Alexa won’t be replacing doctors any time soon, but Amazon says artificial intelligence can help hospitals become more efficient.
The internet giant said on Monday that it is working with a Harvard-affiliated teaching hospital in Boston to test how AI can simplify medical care. This is the latest sign of powerhouse tech companies such as Amazon and Google deepening their reach into America’s $3.5-trillion health-care market.
While the tech industry has high hopes that powerful computing tools can improve diagnoses and treatment, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s first projects with Amazon.com Inc are less about sophisticated therapies and more about making day-to-day tasks such as patient scheduling more cost-effective.
“They’re identifying the right problems where machine learning truly can help,” said Taha Kass-Hout, senior leader for health care and AI at Amazon.
The Seattle-based tech behemoth gave the Harvard Medical School teaching hospital a grant valued at $2 million to experiment with machine learning and AI.
Beth Israel Deaconess, a 673-bed medical centre with a network of other hospitals and clinics in metro Boston, began purchasing Amazons cloud services in 2016. “The goal was to ensure that the hospital’s data would be accessible if a disaster were to knock out its off-site backup servers,” said John Halamka, executive director of the Health Technology Exploration Center at Beth Israel Lahey Health.
“Once its data was hosted in Amazon’s cloud, hospital officials started asking whether the technology could automate cumbersome manual work,” added Halamka.
Amazon’s tools are now helping Beth Israel Deaconess book operating room time more precisely and predict when patients are likely to miss appointments with its most in-demand specialists. The software can also help find needed paperwork in a stack of scanned documents and alert staff if its missing or incomplete. “The approach has already helped Beth Israel Deaconess expand the capacity of its 41 operating rooms,” Halamka said.
Ease in scheduling
Beth Israel Deaconess and Amazon engineers analysed anonymous data from surgeries at the hospital going back to the 1980s. They developed and tested the new scheduling system over the past two years, and it has increased operating room capacity by 30 per cent, Halamka said. Then the hospital built a system that lets doctors reserve operating time as easily as booking restaurants online.
Amazon’s Kass-Hout said such innovations will ultimately give patients a more tailored experience, similar to what the company provides in its online retail sales. “If you shop on Amazon, you pretty much have experienced machine learning and personalisation,” he said.
Tech firms in healthcare
Alphabet Inc’s Google unit has hundreds of artificial intelligence engineers devoted to health care, according to a spokeswoman.
Apple Inc is marketing the latest version of its smartwatch to insurance plans as a device with the potential to improve members health. Other tech giants, including Microsoft Corp, International Business Machines Corp and Salesforce.com, are targeting the medical industry as well.
“Technology companies may be able help medical providers better shape their services to meet patients unique needs,” said Gurpreet Singh, US health services leader at consultant PwC.
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