SEATTLE, March 5, 2026, 07:04 PST
- AWS rolled out Amazon Connect Health, aiming to automate a range of tasks—patient verification, scheduling, clinical notes, and medical coding all included.
- Plugged straight into electronic health records, the tool is set up to route more complicated cases to staff.
- Amazon shares ticked up roughly 1% in early U.S. trading.
Amazon.com Inc’s cloud division on Thursday rolled out Amazon Connect Health, pitching the AI-powered platform as a fix for some of the phone traffic and paperwork bogging down clinics and hospitals. Shares of Amazon added roughly 1% in early U.S. trading.
It’s a refrain that keeps coming up: spend less on paperwork, free up hours for patient care. In the U.S., 89% of respondents who either switched providers or stopped altogether pointed to “ease of navigation” headaches, according to an Accenture survey. Complaints ranged from clunky processes and poor interactions at reception to digital tools falling short of expectations.
The race for healthcare data and workflow tools is heating up. CVS Health on Thursday unveiled plans to team up with Alphabet’s Google Cloud on Health100, an AI-driven platform slated for launch in 2026. The platform will use “agentic AI” technology designed to operate with little need for human oversight. Reuters
AWS describes Amazon Connect Health as “agentic AI,” meaning the software isn’t limited to fielding questions—it’s built to act autonomously. The company says it links up directly with electronic health records, or EHRs. Its product page highlights five features: patient verification and ambient documentation are already live, while appointment management, patient insights, and medical coding remain in preview. That medical coding tool? It’s designed to create ICD-10 and CPT billing codes for U.S. users. Amazon Web Services, Inc.
AWS is putting its early customer stats front and center. In a blog post, senior vice president Colleen Aubrey said staff can spend as much as 80% of their call time wrangling data from scattered tools. “Health care should be about people, but too often, the patient is overshadowed by the process,” she wrote. UC San Diego Health, according to AWS, is now saving roughly a minute per call and seeing fewer abandoned calls. Amazon One Medical, meanwhile, has relied on the documentation feature for over a million patient visits. Amazon News
Naji Shafi, who leads healthcare AI at AWS, told Healthcare Dive the new system targets those “cost everyone” workloads sapping time and fueling burnout. “Our healthcare workers are overburdened, drowning in administrative complexity,” he said. The software can even spot frustration and trigger human intervention: “If I’m getting frustrated, our AI agent will detect that.” Shafi laid out safeguards—there’s always human review for documentation and codes, and AWS uses a “large language model as a judge,” meaning a second model steps in to assess the first’s output. Healthcare Dive
AWS is charging $99 per user each month for ambient documentation, covering up to 600 encounters per user, with extra fees for additional usage. Patient verification comes in at $0.15 per “action”—basically, one complete conversation, by AWS’s definition. There are also time-limited free trials available for first-time users. Amazon Web Services, Inc.
AWS is wading further into territory where cloud competitors have been pitching tailored AI and workflow products, going beyond just selling compute. For Amazon, it’s another way to connect its healthcare ambitions to the AWS juggernaut—a business that’s already bringing in huge profits.
But there are pitfalls to automating medicine. Just last month, a Reuters investigation detailed physicians dealing with inaccurate or confusing responses from consumer AI tools, fueling wider concerns about reliability and regulation—even when AI is pitched as merely “assistive” instead of diagnostic. Reuters
Amazon is weaving these changes into a broader effort to pare expenses and ramp up automation. The company acknowledged layoffs in its robotics division this week—just the latest in a series of job reductions—and commented, “We regularly review our organizations to make sure teams are best set up to innovate and deliver for our customers.” Reuters
