Adding to a flurry of new services announced at its re:Invent cloud conference this week in Las Vegas, Amazon Web Services Inc. Tuesday launched a new service that allows healthcare providers to mine medical records for information that can be used to improve patient treatment and reduce costs.

Called Amazon Comprehend Medical, the product uses machine learning to deliver what is described as a “HIPAA-eligible machine learning service that allows developers to process unstructured medical text and identify information such as patient diagnosis, treatments, dosages, symptoms and signs, and more.”

ACM is pitched as being able to identify medical conditions, anatomic terms, medications, details of medical tests, treatments and procedures in a variety of documents. Using AWS’ artificial intelligence, ACM can scan through documents and pictures to identify data that’s relevant to medical professionals in delivering informed medical treatment.

“The majority of health and patient data is stored today as unstructured medical text, such as medical notes, prescriptions, audio interview transcripts, and pathology and radiology reports,” the Amazon.com Inc. cloud unit explained in a blog post. “Identifying this information today is a manual and time-consuming process, which either requires data entry by high skilled medical experts, or teams of developers writing custom code and rules to try and extract the information automatically. In both cases, this undifferentiated heavy lifting takes material resources away from efforts to improve patient outcomes through technology.”

Notably, the service is said to be able to read and transcribe notes made by doctors as well.

Prior to launch, ACM has been tested by The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and is claimed to have helped the center identify patients who might be able to participate in experimental drug studies.

This is not Amazon’s first push into the medtech industry. The e-commerce giant acquired pharmacy startup PillPack Inc. in June for around $1 billion.

Amazon is also involved in a partnership with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. to provide healthcare services to their more than 1 million employees. It’s reported that it might turn into a broader healthcare product that Amazon may directly sell to the broader U.S. public.

Photo: ell-r-brown/Flickr