Patient-centric and AI-powered: How startups are breathing new life into healthcare

It’s easy to picture the benefits of a world where healthcare is personalized, digitized, and delivered seamlessly. Patient-centric care has the potential to be life-changing—from accelerating accurate diagnoses, to providing the right treatments at the right time, and ultimately paving the way for healthier populations.  

To date, growing patient volumes and ongoing physician shortages have meant that administrative burdens quickly mount up. Added to this, inefficient workflows drive up operational expenses and create huge demands on clinicians. Meanwhile, patients face delays and frustrations in their care journey. Now, generative AI is changing that by empowering healthcare providers with valuable insights and freeing up time to focus on what matters—providing quality care. 

Startups are at the forefront of transforming healthcare by securely embedding AI throughout the patient journey. Working with Amazon Web Services (AWS), they are tackling some of the industry’s toughest challenges and making strides towards better care outcomes around the world. In this article, we dive into real-world examples of how they’re using generative AI to make a meaningful difference across clinical workflows, patient engagement, and care management.  

The cure for clinical workflow overload 

Diminishing documentation presents a huge opportunity for helping staff do more with less, all while improving workforce attrition and wellbeing. Clinicians currently spend up to a third of their workday completing medical charting—often after working hours. And when the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that there will be a global shortage of 11 million health workers by 2030, efficiencies can help significantly bridge the gap and improve the industry’s prospects.  

Imagine, then, the impact of streamlining those administrative tasks and making patient data readily available at scale. It would afford individual healthcare professionals the time to focus on their patients, improving quality of care, and advancing overall population health. Already, generative AI is making a profound impact on workforces by unlocking insights from unstructured data to improve decision-making and care delivery. Users can rapidly summarize patient records into the electronic health record (EHR), capture medical notes in moments, and even gain diagnostic insights based on medical imaging and multimodal data.  

Commure is one startup at the beating heart of delivering AI-powered clinical workflows with AWS’s support. Ambient AI, for example, is its self-service scribe solution that drafts high-quality medical notes by listening to patient and clinician conversations in real time. By combining the latest Claude Sonnet large language models in Amazon Bedrock and advanced natural language processing capabilities, it’s able to extract clinically relevant data from interactions and dynamically populate EHRs with patient history, medications, and symptoms. 

Used in over five million encounters annually, Ambient AI has cut clinical documentation time by a staggering 81 percent. Now it takes just 43 seconds on average to close a clinical note, making patient interactions more productive and empowering clinicians to be more attentive to their needs.  

Giving patients the personalized treatment   

Patients are seeking new ways to interact with healthcare systems. For organizations, this means offering innovative digital capabilities and consumer-like experiences that make quality care accessible, such as self-service triage, online chats, and telehealth options. By integrating generative AI across the care continuum, providers can turn transactional touchpoints into personalized engagements.   

Startups are collaborating closely with AWS on initiatives to proactively communicate with patients in this way and give them the tools to better manage their health— all while meeting strict HIPAA compliance requirements. This includes creating patient friendly reports to cut through confusing medical jargon and generating tailored post-discharge guidance to support a smooth path to recovery.  

Hippocratic AI is a prime example of how positive patient outcomes can be powered by AI. The company’s AI clinical assistants provide preventative healthcare and medical guidance at scale by conducting remote patient monitoring calls to address mission-critical gaps in care. Extending far beyond a chatbot, its AI agents recently coordinated outreach to 100,000 patients in a single day during a recent hurricane in Florida.  

Patients benefit from empathetic and engaging interactions made possible through its sophisticated speech technology together with over 20 specialized foundation models. This ensures that safety and control is maintained—something that’s especially important when agents cover over-the-counter medication guidance, prescriptions, and lab analysis. Hippocratic AI uses Amazon SageMaker HyperPod to automatically apply the best training configurations, helping them scale and accelerate model development. As a startup, it has empowered them to remove the undifferentiated heavy lifting of building generative AI models and achieve optimal performance at a low cost.  

Similarly, Commure is using AWS services including Amazon Bedrock to create a digital front office with its AI Call Center. Agents send real-time updates to patients about appointments, medications, lab results, and educational materials. They can also help patients book consultations, prepare them for medical procedures, and even explain insurance contributions in detail.  

Powering precision medicine and proactive care 

Increasing volumes of healthcare data have historically made it challenging to extract valuable insights needed to nurture proactive and personalized care. The opportunity has been largely untapped, with the World Economic Forum finding that 97 percent of all global data produced by hospitals annually goes unused. Yet when this data is transformed into strategic assets using generative AI, the real-world potential is immense. 

Care management can be reimagined by analyzing records of registries, patient records, and cohorts in the EHR to identify health risks at both an individual and population level. It can forecast diseases in patients and in turn support value-based care programs. Actionable data derived from these sources make it possible to provide proactive care and preventative treatment—some of which can mean the difference between life or death. By leveraging high-performance infrastructure and machine learning tools from AWS, startups have made leaps in progress in this space. They can handle petabytes of data and create cutting-edge generative AI applications at a low cost.  

Owkin, for instance, has developed AI solutions for precision medicine. With their AI diagnostics product, healthcare organizations can pre-screen for biomarkers and predict oncology outcomes. Uniting data provides the fuller picture of a patient’s disease—visibility that helps more patients benefit from targeted therapies for their unique needs. Compared with traditional tests, the business’s clinically validated AI diagnostics can be conducted in minutes versus weeks, saving precious time and helping healthcare professionals diagnose and treat more patients in less time.  

Helping AI become the lifeblood of healthcare  

From consultation to treatment and follow up, generative AI is proving to be the antidote to pressing challenges along the patient and clinician journey. With hands-on experience working in healthcare and life sciences, thousands of organizations trust AWS to not only help them innovate, but also raise their security posture and comply with strict regulations.  

To deliver the tangible benefits of personalized care, startups are taking advantage of deep domain knowledge, technology expertise, and comprehensive generative AI stack. In doing so, they’re helping providers optimize workflows, reduce operational burdens, and deliver more efficient, patient-centric care. With no need to compromise between cost, performance, and security, they can focus on tackling critical industry needs. 

To help you confidently kickstart your AI journey, there’s a wealth of AWS support and programs available for startups—including AWS Activate and the Generative AI Accelerator. Reach out to AWS healthcare specialists today to find out more.