Amazon confirms it’s working on a project to mine patient records and more accurately diagnose diseases

The company’s senior leader in health care and artificial intelligence, Taha Kass-Hout, told the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday that internal tests showed that the software performed as good or better than other published efforts to extract data on patients’ medical conditions, lab orders and procedures.

Amazon said the reason it got into this space is to help speed up the process of making sense of health data, which isn’t usually stored in ways that computers can understand and analyze.