AWS HealthScribe

What is AWS HealthScribe and who sells it?

Amazon Web Services sells it as a HIPAA-eligible service inside Amazon Transcribe. AWS describes it as a way to "automatically create clinical notes from patient-clinician conversations using generative AI." It was announced in preview in July 2023 and became generally available on November 27, 2023. The service runs in US East (N. Virginia) and recognizes English (en-US) only.

On March 5, 2026, AWS made Amazon Connect Health generally available in US East and West. Per AWS's announcement summary, it bundles five agents: patient verification, appointment management, patient insights, ambient documentation and medical coding. The HealthScribe page now recommends Connect Health for "AWS's latest clinical documentation experience." Whether AWS plans to retire HealthScribe is not stated.

What does it produce?

Each request returns a turn-by-turn transcript with word-level timestamps, speaker role identification (up to four speakers, per the AWS docs), transcript segmentation into small talk, subjective and objective portions, and extracted medical terms covering conditions, medications and treatments. The summary note has sections such as chief complaint, history of present illness, assessment and plan, and there is a GIRPP template for behavioral health.

The feature AWS stresses is evidence mapping. Every sentence in the generated note links back to the part of the transcript that supports it, so a reviewer can check a claim against what was actually said.

AWS's own documentation sets the limits. The output is a preliminary note that needs clinician review, it can hallucinate, and observations made silently during an exam are not captured. The Transcribe documentation lists 22 supported specialties, while the responsible AI page mentions general medicine and orthopedics.

What does it cost?

As of October 2026, AWS bills HealthScribe in one-second increments at $0.10 per audio minute (about $0.001667 per second) in US East (N. Virginia), with a 15-second minimum per request. The pricing page works through an example of 1,000 consultations a month, 15,000 minutes in all, at $1,500. New accounts get up to 300 audio minutes a month free for the first two months. Those prices cover transcription, speaker identification, segmentation, entity extraction and note summarization together.

The pricing page gives no per-clinician figure. A third-party report puts Connect Health ambient documentation at $99 per user per month for up to 600 encounters, which no AWS page confirms. The AWS Enterprise Discount Program or Savings Plans may apply.

What does the buyer still have to build?

Everything around the API. A competitor's blog (Plaud) says there is no clinician interface, and the same source notes that under shared responsibility the customer configures encryption, access control and audit logging. EHR connections are not listed and fall to the customer. AWS states it does not retain input audio or output text and does not use customer data to train its models. It signs a business associate agreement with HIPAA-regulated customers, per HIPAA Journal. SOC 2 and HITRUST are not stated on the product page.

The verdict

HealthScribe is a sensible building block for a team with developers, and the sentence-level evidence trail is a real design strength. It is not a scribe a working clinic can deploy, because the clinician interface and the EHR connections are left to the buyer. AWS's own page now points new customers to Connect Health, so HealthScribe's long-term place in the lineup is unclear.