Amazon to market health care to others
Expansion prompts privacy concerns
SAN FRANCISCO — Amazon said Wednesday that it will offer its on-demand health-care service to other companies, a step forward in tech giants’ ambitions to play a larger role in the space.
For years, Amazon, Apple, Google and others have been creeping into health care, prompting privacy concerns because of the large amount of data the companies already have on users — from searches on health conditions to monitoring information from wearable devices.
The e-commerce giant, whose CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington post, sells specialized equipment to hospitals through its Amazon Business arm. Its cloud computing division offers a HIPAA-compliant machine learning service to extract health data from medical text. It sells a wearable arm band that can track body fat. It acquired medication delivery company PillPack in 2019 and launched Amazon Pharmacy. It was also part of an effort called Haven to innovate health care with JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathway, though the group shuttered in January.
It launched Amazon Care for its employees in Washington state 18 months ago. The service allows employees and their families to text or video-chat with health-care providers, usually within 60 seconds of their request, and in some cases, it sends doctors to make home visits.
Now Amazon will sell Care to other companies based in Washington state for an undisclosed price. Amazon said in a news release that it would start selling to companies across the country this summer and expand its program to all employees at that time.
Amazon’s health-care ambitions raise privacy concerns for some experts, who point out how much Amazon, and fellow tech giants Google and Apple, already know about consumers from their online shopping and searching habits.
“We look at these big tech companies, and we have to be really careful about the creepiness factor,” said Forrester principal analyst Arielle Trzcinski. “There’s a sense of, ‘If I’m going to trust you with my data, it needs to bring me value.’”
Amazon will not have access to patients’ medical information and “does not recommend products or services based on a patient’s health information,” Amazon Care Director Kristen Helton said in an emailed statement.
Amazon’s latest effort falls more on the health-care side of things, rather than general wellness that Fitbit and devices focus on, said Gartner analyst Lydia Clougherty Jones. Consumers will have to balance Amazon’s privacy policies with the convenience and efficacy the service brings, she said. Companies seem to be getting better about laying out what they will do with health data, she said.
“It seems like with every progression in the wellness, health and retail space there’s more and more transparency to build the trust,” she said.