Amazon’s Latest Healthcare Venture: Bringing Alexa To The Patient’s Bedside

Amazon is increasingly investing in the multi-trillion dollar market that entails healthcare. This is certainly within the scope of the e-commerce company, given its track-record of bringing new and innovative technologies into existing markets. Most prominent with regards to healthcare is Amazon’s efforts with Amazon Care, the company’s initiative in offering telehealth services.

Earlier today, Amazon announced its latest venture: integrating and scaling its famous Alexa systems into senior living communities and large healthcare systems.

The goal, as narrated by the leaders behind this initiative, is straightforward: improve people’s quality of lives. Liron Torres, Head of Alexa Smart Properties explains: “We’re excited to extend the experiences customers already love to senior living communities and healthcare systems, and give providers new ways to save time and personalize care for their patients and residents.”

For senior living facilities, the idea is to develop a stronger sense of community and connectedness: the initiative aims to “tailor resident experiences by customizing community information like activity schedules and meal menus. Care team members can communicate more efficiently with residents using Alexa communication features, which enable them to make Announcements, voice and video calls, or send direct audio messages to other Alexa-enabled devices throughout the property.”

For hospital systems, efficiency and communication are key factors: “patients can communicate with their care staff, control devices in their room, or stay informed and entertained with news and music, just by asking Alexa. Healthcare providers can communicate with patients quickly and easily with features like calling and Drop In—without the need to enter patient rooms. This enables hospitals to increase productivity, conserve medical supplies and protective equipment, such as masks, gloves, and gowns, and free up staff time to provide more personalized care.”

Thus far, many prominent names in the healthcare space are already working to adopt Alexa into their patient care workflows, including Boston Children’s Hospital, Cedars-Sinai, BayCare, and Houston Methodist.

But this venture is crucial not only because hospitals are now embracing more digital tools; perhaps more important is that this novel partnership and commitment to digital connectivity indicates a new era and focus to improve quality of life for patients and residents.

An extremely well-established principle in clinical medicine is that patient healthcare outcomes and longevity are often linked to far more than purely medical treatment; simply put, patients have better health outcomes when multiple externalities are emphasized, including things such as a comfortable stay, positive support systems, frequent visits from family, and a feeling of community—the idea that a patient has other people that can empathize with and understand their situation.

Platforms that can potentially augment some of these externalities—such as Alexa and other digital connectivity tools—can truly reshape the quality of care for a patient. For example, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, one of the most emotionally challenging aspects was that family members could not visit Covid infected patients. While this was intended to mitigate spread of infection, this also meant dire end-of-life situations for many people that were critically ill: they had to spend their last days alone, often only being able to say goodbye to their loved ones over the phone.

Though not exactly a replacement for actual human contact, smarter connectivity devices may help slightly alleviate the stresses of this, offering the ability to connect with other residents from the comfort of a patient’s room, giving an opportunity to connect with family at any time, providing the ability to feel included, etc. These are just some of the many intrinsic benefits that may result from initiatives like this.

Of course, patient safety, privacy, and security all come into mind, as they should—after all, if remote connectivity devices are going to be available for patients to use 24/7, they also can potentially create room for massive vulnerabilities. With regards to Alexa, the press release indicates: “Alexa Smart Properties senior living and healthcare solutions were designed with privacy in mind. No personal information is shared with Alexa to use the device, and voice recordings are not saved. Every Amazon Echo device offers multiple layers of privacy protection, and residents and patients can disable Alexa’s ability to respond to the wake word at any time by simply pressing the mute button on top of their Echo device. Amazon implements administrative, technical, and physical safeguards for protected health information received as part of HIPAA-eligible skill interactions.” However, as an overall principle, companies that are entering this space must keep the privacy and security issues in mind—purely because of the vulnerable nature of the business.

Indeed, perhaps this initiative signals the dawn of a new era of digital connectivity in the healthcare space. Time will tell how companies are able to scale this technology in a safe, secure, and well thought-out manner, and congruently, what kind of value patients will actually derive from this potentially promising venture.