Comprehend Medical & Transcribe Medical

Amazon Comprehend Medical & Transcribe Medical — HIPAA-eligible AI services for healthcare: extract medical entities from text and transcribe clinical conversations.

What are Comprehend Medical & Transcribe Medical?

Amazon Comprehend Medical is a HIPAA-eligible NLP service that extracts medical information (conditions, medications, dosages, procedures) from unstructured clinical text.

Amazon Transcribe Medical is a HIPAA-eligible speech recognition service that converts medical conversations and dictations into text with specialized medical vocabulary.

Key Insight: Both services are pre-trained on medical data, HIPAA-eligible, and require no ML expertise — just call the API.

Amazon Comprehend Medical

Key Features

Feature	Description
Medical Entity Detection	Identifies conditions, medications, dosages, procedures, anatomy
Protected Health Information (PHI)	Detects PHI entities across HIPAA Safe Harbor categories (you perform redaction in your application workflow)
Ontology Linking	Maps entities to ICD-10-CM, RxNorm, SNOMED CT
Relationship Extraction	Links medications to dosages, conditions to treatments
Confidence Scores	Returns confidence levels for each detected entity
Batch Processing	Process large document collections asynchronously
HIPAA Eligible	Covered under AWS BAA for protected health information

Use Cases

Clinical Documentation Extract structured data from physician notes, discharge summaries, and patient records for EHR integration.

Pharmacovigilance Identify adverse drug events from clinical trial reports and post-market surveillance.

Claims Processing Auto-extract diagnosis codes (ICD-10-CM) and procedure codes for insurance claims validation.

Clinical Research Identify patients matching clinical trial criteria by analyzing medical histories.

Revenue Cycle Management Extract billable procedures and diagnoses for medical coding automation.

Pricing & Free Tier

Aspect	Details
Free Tier (first month)	8.5 million characters
Entity Detection (NERe)	$0.01 per unit (first 1M units), $0.005 (1M-10M), $0.001 (10M+)
PHI Detection	$0.01 per unit (first 1M units), tiered pricing
ICD-10-CM Linking	$0.01 per unit (first 1M units), tiered pricing
RxNorm Linking	$0.01 per unit (first 1M units), tiered pricing
SNOMED CT Linking	$0.01 per unit (first 1M units), tiered pricing

Note: 1 unit = 100 characters. Average 5-page chart = ~8,500 characters = 85 units.

⚠️ Pricing Disclaimer: AWS pricing is subject to change. Pricing shown is based on information available as of January 2026. Always verify current pricing at the official Comprehend Medical pricing page.

How It Works

# Extract medical entities
response = comprehend_medical.detect_entities_v2(
    Text="Patient diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. Prescribed metformin 500mg twice daily."
)
 
# Returns:
# Entities: [
#   {"Text": "Type 2 diabetes", "Category": "MEDICAL_CONDITION", "Type": "DX_NAME"},
#   {"Text": "metformin", "Category": "MEDICATION", "Type": "GENERIC_NAME"},
#   {"Text": "500mg", "Category": "MEDICATION", "Type": "STRENGTH"}
# ]

Amazon Transcribe Medical

Key Features

Feature	Description
Medical Vocabulary	Pre-trained on clinical terminology, medications, procedures
Automatic Punctuation	Adds proper punctuation and formatting
Speaker Identification	Distinguishes between clinician and patient
Real-time Streaming	Live transcription during consultations
Batch Processing	Process recorded audio files
PHI Identification	Automatically detects protected health information
Specialty Support	Optimized for primary care, cardiology, neurology, oncology, radiology, urology, OB-GYN, pediatrics
HIPAA Eligible	Covered under AWS BAA

Use Cases

Clinical Documentation Transcribe doctor-patient conversations in real-time for automated note-taking and EHR entry.

Medical Dictation Convert physician dictations into text for patient charts, reports, and prescriptions.

Telemedicine Automatically transcribe virtual consultations for documentation and compliance.

Medical Transcription Services Replace manual transcription with automated, cost-effective solution.

Quality Assurance Transcribe patient calls for training and compliance monitoring.

Pricing & Free Tier

Aspect	Details
Free Tier (first 12 months)	60 minutes/month
Batch Transcription	$0.075 per minute ($4.50/hour)
Streaming Transcription	$0.075 per minute ($4.50/hour)
Minimum Charge	15 seconds per request

Cost Comparison:

Standard Transcribe: $0.024/min

Transcribe Medical: $0.075/min (3.1x more expensive)

Premium reflects specialized medical vocabulary and HIPAA compliance

⚠️ Pricing Disclaimer: AWS pricing is subject to change. Pricing shown is based on information available as of January 2026. Always verify current pricing at the official Transcribe pricing page (Medical section).

How It Works

# Start medical transcription job
response = transcribe_medical.start_medical_transcription_job(
    MedicalTranscriptionJobName='consultation-123',
    LanguageCode='en-US',
    MediaFormat='mp3',
    Media={'MediaFileUri': 's3://bucket/audio.mp3'},
    OutputBucketName='bucket',
    Specialty='PRIMARYCARE',  # or CARDIOLOGY, NEUROLOGY, etc.
    Type='CONVERSATION'  # or DICTATION
)