3M Health Information Systems has announced a collaboration with Amazon Web Services to accelerate the innovation and advancement of its M*Modal ambient intelligence machine learning and generative AI services, including Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Comprehend Medical and Amazon Transcribe Medical.

WHY IT MATTERS

Compatible with more than 250 electronic health records, more than 300,000 clinicians use M*Modal for real-time speech recognition compatible and ambient clinical documentation, according to the company.

When built into clinical workflows, AI technology can help clinicians focus more on direct patient care by automating structured notes in the EHR. Using Amazon Bedrock's generative AI service will further scale and accelerate conversational AI for greater flexibility and usability for end users, says 3M.

"3M's ambient capability allows our doctors to focus on what they do best – 'the medicine,'" added Garri Garrison, 3M HIS president.

AWS security and reliability can also help 3M accelerate the delivery of high-quality clinical documentation, Garrison said. 

Using contextual understanding, 3M Fluency Align uses the patient-physician conversation and available EHR data to create a quality-reviewed note directly in the patient record, ready for physician review and sign-off. 

"We believe that 'language is the highest form of intelligence' and that the smart use of AI in healthcare can super-charge our clinical ability," said Dr. Shankar Sridharan, consultant pediatric cardiologist and chief clinical and informatics officer for Great Ormond Street Hospital, U.K., in the announcement.

THE LARGER TREND

Contributing to physician and nurse burnout for several years, the American Medical Informatics Association launched a multi-stakeholder effort last year to study and seek solutions to alleviate the documentation burden for U.S. clinicians.

The goal is to reduce the documentation burden for U.S. clinicians to 25% of its current state in the next five years, something that AI holds promise for.

Contributing to a high prevalence of text duplication, the documentation burden has also resulted in adaptive behaviors where clinical note authors continuously create copies of old notes and then add them to patient records, one study of note duplication found.

"The note paradigm for documentation should be further examined as a major cause of duplication and scatter, and alternative paradigms should be evaluated," said the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine researchers who published their report last year.

ON THE RECORD

"Our overarching goal is to create a better, more sustainable solution and to continue to be a trusted partner that our clients can rely on to reduce administrative tasks and prioritize patient engagement, Garrison said in the statement.

"Using AWS ML services, 3M will enable the integration of approved information from physician and patient conversations directly into this workflow, placing the focus on the patient," Tehsin Syed, general manager of health AI at AWS, added.

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.