In high-volume healthcare contact facilities, each affected person dialog carries each medical and operational significance, making correct real-time transcription crucial for automated workflows. Correct, on the spot transcription allows clever automation with out sacrificing readability or care, in order that groups can automate digital medical file (EMR) file matching, streamline workflows, and eradicate guide information entry. By eradicating routine course of steps, workers can keep totally centered on affected person conversations, bettering each the expertise and the result. As healthcare techniques search to stability effectivity with empathy, real-time transcription has grow to be a functionality for delivering responsive, high-quality care at scale.
Switchboard, MD is a physician-led AI and information science firm with a mission to prioritize the human connection in medication. Its service improves affected person engagement and outcomes, whereas lowering inefficiency and burnout. By designing and deploying clinically related options, Switchboard, MD helps suppliers and operators collaborate extra successfully to ship nice experiences for each sufferers and workers. One in all its key options is streamlining the contact heart utilizing AI voice automation, real-time medical file matching, and urged subsequent steps, which has led to important reductions in queue occasions and name abandonment charges.
With greater than 20,000 calls dealt with every month, Switchboard, MD helps healthcare suppliers in delivering well timed, customized communication at scale. Its AI platform is already serving to scale back name queue occasions, enhance affected person engagement, and streamline contact heart operations for clinics and well being techniques. Clients utilizing Switchboard have seen outcomes equivalent to:
- 75% discount in queue occasions
- 59% discount in name abandonment fee
Regardless of these early successes, Switchboard confronted a important problem: their current transcription strategy couldn’t scale economically whereas sustaining the accuracy required for medical workflows. Price and phrase error fee (WER) weren’t simply operational metrics—they had been important enablers for scaling automation and increasing Switchboard’s affect throughout extra affected person interactions.
On this publish, we study the precise challenges Switchboard, MD confronted with scaling transcription accuracy and cost-effectiveness in medical environments, their analysis course of for choosing the correct transcription resolution, and the technical structure they applied utilizing Amazon Join and Amazon Kinesis Video Streams. This publish particulars the spectacular outcomes achieved and demonstrates how they had been in a position to make use of this basis to automate EMR matching and provides healthcare workers extra time to concentrate on affected person care. Lastly, we’ll take a look at the broader implications for healthcare AI automation and the way different organizations can implement comparable options utilizing Amazon Bedrock.
Selecting an correct, scalable, and cost-effective transcription mannequin for contact heart automation
Switchboard, MD wanted a transcription resolution that delivered excessive accuracy at a sustainable price. In medical settings, transcription accuracy is important as a result of errors can compromise EMR file matching, have an effect on really useful remedy plans, and disrupt automated workflows. On the identical time, scaling assist for 1000’s of calls every week meant that inference prices couldn’t be ignored.
Switchboard initially explored a number of paths, together with evaluating open supply fashions equivalent to Open AI’s Whisper mannequin hosted domestically. However these choices introduced tradeoffs—both in efficiency, price, or integration complexity.
After testing, the staff decided that Amazon Nova Sonic supplied the correct mixture of transcription high quality and effectivity wanted to assist their healthcare use case. The mannequin carried out reliably throughout stay caller audio, even in noisy or variable circumstances. It delivered:
- 80–90% decrease transcription prices
- A phrase error fee of 4% on Switchboard’s proprietary analysis dataset
- Low-latency output that aligned with their want for real-time processing
Equally necessary, Nova Sonic built-in easily into Switchboard’s current structure, minimizing engineering elevate and accelerating deployment. With this basis, the staff decreased guide transcription steps and scaled correct, real-time automation throughout 1000’s of affected person interactions.
“Our imaginative and prescient is to revive the human connection in medication by eradicating administrative boundaries that get in the best way of significant interplay. Nova Sonic gave us the velocity and accuracy we would have liked to transcribe calls in actual time—so our prospects can concentrate on what really issues: the affected person dialog. By lowering our transcription prices by 80–90%, it’s additionally made real-time automation sustainable at scale.”
– Dr. Blake Anderson, Founder, CEO, and CTO, Switchboard, MD
Structure and implementation
Switchboard’s structure makes use of Amazon Connect with seize stay audio from each sufferers and representatives. Switchboard processes audio streams by way of Amazon Kinesis Video Streams , which handles the real-time media conversion earlier than routing the information to containerized AWS Lambda capabilities. Switchboard’s Lambda capabilities set up bidirectional streaming connections with Amazon Nova Sonic utilizing BedrockRuntimeClient’s InvokeModelWithBidirectionalStream API. This novel structure creates separate transcription streams for every dialog participant, which Switchboard recombines to create the entire transcription file. Your entire processing pipeline runs in a serverless atmosphere, offering scalable operation designed to deal with 1000’s of concurrent calls whereas utilizing Nova Sonic’s real-time speech-to-text capabilities for instant transcription processing.
Nova Sonic integration: Actual-time speech processing
Harnessing Amazon Nova Sonic’s superior audio streaming and processing, Switchboard developed and constructed the aptitude of separating and recombining audio system’ streams and transcripts. This makes Amazon Nova Sonic notably efficient for Switchboard’s healthcare purposes, the place correct transcription and speaker identification are essential.
Amazon Nova Sonic provides configurable settings that may be optimized for various healthcare use circumstances, with the pliability to prioritize both transcription or speech technology based mostly on particular wants. A key cost-optimization characteristic is the power to regulate speech output tokens – organizations can set decrease token values when primarily centered on transcription, leading to important price financial savings whereas sustaining excessive accuracy. This versatility and price flexibility makes Amazon Nova Sonic a helpful device for healthcare organizations like Switchboard seeking to implement voice-enabled options.
Why serverless: Strategic benefits for healthcare innovation
Switchboard’s alternative of a serverless structure utilizing Amazon Join, Amazon Kinesis Video Streams, and containerized Lambda capabilities represents a strategic determination that maximizes operational effectivity whereas minimizing infrastructure overhead. The serverless strategy eliminates the necessity to provision, handle, and monitor underlying infrastructure, in order that Switchboard’s engineering staff can concentrate on creating medical automation options fairly than server administration. This structure offers built-in fault tolerance and excessive availability for important healthcare communications with out requiring in depth configuration from Switchboard’s staff.
Switchboard’s event-driven structure, proven within the following determine, allows the system to scale from dealing with dozens to 1000’s of concurrent calls, with AWS routinely managing capability provisioning behind the scenes. The pay-as-you-go billing mannequin helps Switchboard pay just for compute sources used throughout name processing, optimizing prices whereas eliminating the danger of over-provisioning servers that will sit idle throughout low-volume intervals.
Conclusion
Switchboard, MD’s implementation of Amazon Nova Sonic demonstrates how the correct transcription know-how can rework healthcare operations. By reaching 80–90% price reductions whereas sustaining clinical-grade accuracy, they’ve created a sustainable basis for scaling AI-powered affected person interactions throughout the healthcare business.
By constructing on Amazon Bedrock, Switchboard now has the pliability to broaden automation throughout extra use circumstances and supplier networks. Their success exemplifies how healthcare innovators can mix accuracy, velocity, and effectivity to remodel how care groups join with sufferers—one dialog at a time.
Get began with Amazon Nova on the Amazon Bedrock console. Be taught extra about Amazon Nova fashions on the Amazon Nova product web page.
In regards to the authors
Tanner Jones is a Technical Account Supervisor in AWS Enterprise Assist, the place he helps prospects navigate and optimize their manufacturing purposes on AWS. He focuses on serving to prospects develop purposes that incorporate AI brokers, with a specific concentrate on constructing protected multi-agent techniques.
Anuj Jauhari is a Sr. Product Advertising Supervisor at AWS, the place he helps prospects innovate and drive enterprise affect with generative AI options constructed on Amazon Nova fashions.
Jonathan Woods is a Options Architect at AWS based mostly in Nashville at the moment working with SMB prospects. He has a ardour for speaking AWS know-how to companies in a related method making it straightforward for purchasers to innovate. Exterior of labor, he tries maintaining along with his three youngsters.
Nauman Zulfiqar is a senior account supervisor based mostly in New York working with SMB purchasers. He loves constructing and sustaining sturdy buyer relationships, understanding their enterprise challenges and serving because the buyer’s major enterprise advocate inside AWS.
