Amazon’s Creep Into Health Care Has Some Experts Spooked

Amazon recently said it is losing billions of dollars on Alexa and Echo.  Amazon seems to have lost it's way since Mr. Bezos has been building rockets....that too seems to have bogged down.

The story about Echo is they planned to monetize it by having users purchase items from the Amazon Warehouse.  They saw it as a loss leader.  Amazon claims they sell the echo devices at cost. Meanwhile, the cost of server operations, networks, and personnel is a considerable sum.  90% of users don't use it except to find out the weather, date, or their horoscope.  The first couple of times I used it was fascinating. Now we know more about machine learning and natural language processing it does not seem so magical anymore.  Perhaps setting your thermostat, turning the lights on and off as well as opening up the garage door will entertain us for a while more.  Amazon, much to its profit incentive also licenses its AI to other device manufacturers such as Sonos using the Program Materials License Agreement.

Favorite Alexa gadgets, from speakers to smart clocks.

The networking seems almost endless.  However, ordering and paying for products from a fancy chatbot seems to turn people off.

Amazon bought and operates Pillpak. Amazon bought PillPack for a reported $1 billion in cash.

Amazon also parlayed it into Amazon Pharmacy, purchasing Pillpak from Parker who co-founded PillPack in 2013 along with Chief Product Officer Elliot Cohen. Parker's family operated a mom-and-pop pharmacy, and, while studying to become a pharmacist, he and Cohen developed the idea for a startup that would make it easier for people to buy prescription drugs online and manage their medications. 

The Amazon logo has drifted into televisions, health care, rocket ships, and now is planning an entry into telehealth.  AWS must have empty drives in their cloud space and wants to fill them up with telehealth.   Anyone for an AMAZON EHR?

Using the tech giant’s new telehealth service will mean trusting it with your private data. And for good reason.

This time, it’s aiming for the low-hanging fruit: telehealth, which exploded in popularity during the pandemic. On November 15, Amazon announced the launch of its own telehealth platform, called Amazon Clinic. The service, to roll out in 32 US states, will connect users to health providers to help treat over 20 common conditions, including allergies, acne, and dandruff.  The problem is they are too late for the party. There is already a multitude of successful telehealth companies with an installed base of users. Hospitals and health providers are slow to adopt new companies that have no track record.

The concept is simple: The patient will select their condition, fill out a questionnaire, and Amazon will connect them with a doctor to get a treatment plan. The scheme does not accept insurance; the cost of seeing a doctor will be around that of the average copay for a doctor’s visit, the announcement says: “At Amazon, we want to make it dramatically easier for people to get and stay healthy.”

It’s also seemingly another move by the tech giant to know every last detail about your life—even down to whether you’re suffering from erectile dysfunction (one of the conditions that Amazon Clinic will cover). Yet given that Amazon doesn’t have the squeakiest track record when it comes to protecting data, handing the company the keys to people’s intimate health information raises red flags for privacy experts.

If this feels familiar, it’s because we’ve been here before. The launch of this new service comes hot on the heels of Amazon’s takeover of One Medical, a US company described as a “Netflix-for-healthcare subscription” with around 800,000 members. The acquisition proved controversial due to concerns about patient data privacy mostly centered on the simple fact that Amazon would have access to the data. (When news of the $3.9 billion deal broke in July, it prompted protests outside One Medical’s headquarters in San Francisco.) 

Amazon Care, a telehealth service Amazon piloted among its employees and then rolled out to other customers, shows how things can go wrong. Its shutdown was announced a few months ago, with the senior vice president in charge of the program, Neil Lindsay, writing in an internal memo Amazon shared with WIRED: “Although our enrolled members have loved many aspects of Amazon Care, it is not a complete enough offering for the large enterprise customers we have been targeting and wasn’t going to work long-term.”  

But it was plagued by other problems, too. A Washington Post investigation alleged that moving at top speed and efficiency sometimes conflicted with best practices in medicine: For example, nurses were asked to process patient blood samples in their personal cars, the paper reported, and to store and dispose of medical supplies at home, which they protested. (Amazon told the Post that they could not find records of complaints about these matters.)  

“Amazon Care followed common practices for in-home care and knows them to be safe and appropriate,” Smith told WIRED. “For example, Amazon Care clinicians were always equipped with Stericycle medical waste return equipment to properly and securely return or dispose of supplies.” 

For Sharon, a big concern is how reliant we risk becoming on big companies as mediators of fundamental public needs. “This is a dangerous situation—that we would become dependent on a handful of private actors for the distribution of very basic goods, like health, or education, or public services,” she says. For instance, as these companies increasingly fund and perform their own research, it’s possible they could influence how the research agenda is set. That could be a problem if tech founders’ penchant for wanting to live forever results in a focus on funding longevity research over, say, cancer treatments.

At the very least, Amazon Clinic will be bound by HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which means individual patient records will be protected as soon as a person begins a process with a health care provider. But all the information you provide prior to this—for instance while searching for a doctor—falls outside of the purview of HIPAA, and is technically open for Amazon to gobble up,