Healthcare is Lucrative, but so far, Big Tech has yet to benefit meaningfully from it. While each company has its unique advantages, we’re still so early in the field that any overarching view of the space will not be meaningful enough except to say, please expect lots of exciting innovation, and more than a few expensive failures.
AI is a focus area for everyone though its journey from Code to Clinic is an arduous one
We decided to look at the promising work by Big Tech in Healthcare and dedicate separate posts to them. This one investigates Clinical Documentation!
The Gist, Literally
Clinical documentation and the subsequent summarisation can take many hours per day by physicians in the US. While this may not be the case everywhere (at least not in India, where doctors are unable to give more than 5-10 minutes per patient), this part of the healthcare value chain is a perfect candidate for AI disruption. The task is repetitive, low value, is low risk since it doesn’t directly impact patient health outcomes and also takes up a lot of valuable time. At its core, the the technology primarily converts speech to text, transcribes the data and summarises it using GenAI. Read this article for a chronology of patient record keeping.
The Players
As of now, we have seen products from three players:
Amazon: Amazon launched the Amazon Web Services tool HealthScribe in July 2023. This is the underlying technology that allows applications to be built ON TOP of it- which means that the direct consumer of this service isn’t the doctor or nurse, but the healthcare tech providers that are developing apps used by clinics and hospitals. 3M Health Information Systems (HIS), Babylon and and ScribeEMR have already announced their partnership with AWS here.
Microsoft: Nuance Communications was acquired by Microsoft in 2022, with the aim of ushering in outcome based AI. It recently announced its partnership with Epic (a leader in EHR systems) to introduce clinical summarisation services powered by AI here.
Google: Google announced a collaboration with HCA Healthcare to use GenAI in clinical documentation through this press release.
At this point, Amazon seems to have the only ready to use commercial product (Healthscribe) in Clinical Documentation, while Microsoft and Google are still operating through limited partnerships. We believe integration with other parts of the clinical workflow will be a crucial factor in determining long term success of these technologies.
Summary
The level of competition and the speed with which Big Tech is progressing is demonstrable by the fact that all major updates mentioned in this article were released within a 2 month window (July-Aug 2023). Given the need for high experimentation in this exciting space, it’s difficult to make predictions. We definitely expect a lot more activity though!