AWS data extraction ML tool is now HIPAA eligible

A machine learning service from Amazon Web Services that extracts text and data from scanned documents now has been deemed HIPAA eligible.


A machine learning service from Amazon Web Services that extracts text and data from scanned documents now has been deemed HIPAA eligible.

The designation means that Amazon Textract is now eligible for healthcare workloads that require HIPAA certification.

The launch adds the Textract service to others from AWS artificial intelligent services that have been deemed HIPAA-eligible, including Amazon Translate, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Polly SageMaker and Amazon Rekognition.

The AWS services are intended to help providers that face the routine burden of extracting text and data from documents, such as medical records and forms—this is typically done through manual efforts or simple optical character recognition software. The process can be time-consuming or require extensive post processing before it can be used by other applications.

The AWS services, including Textract, give healthcare organizations the ability to accurately identify and extract text and data from forms and tables in documents of any type of format and from a variety of file types and templates.


The Textract technology has the potential to pull text and data from tables and forms in documents, such as patient information from an insurance claim or values from a table in a scanned in medical chart. Amazon executives say it can recognize a range of document formats, including those that are specific to healthcare and insurance.

Results can be delivered via an application programming interface that can be accessed and used without requiring users to have any machine learning experience.

“Many healthcare customers, like Cerner, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and The American Heart Association, are already exploring new ways use the power of ML to automate their current workloads and transform how they provide care to patients, all while meeting the security and privacy requirements required by HIPAA,” says Kriti Bharti, senior project manager for Amazon Web Services.

Healthcare IT companies, including Change Healthcare, Cambia Health Solutions and ClearDATA, are expected to incorporate the HIPAA-eligible service into their offerings, Bharti contends.

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