The subsequent time you’ve obtained an itchy throat and a stuffy nostril, Amazon needs you to explain your signs to an AI chatbot deputized to do medication.
On Wednesday, Amazon introduced the launch of the brand new characteristic, inviting customers who subscribe to its healthcare service to work together with an AI assistant for customized medical recommendation. The chatbot is on the market now within the One Medical app, which sufferers can use to schedule appointments, message their main care supplier and entry their medical data.
“The U.S. well being care expertise is fragmented, with every supplier seeing solely components of your well being puzzle,” Amazon Well being Companies Senior Vice President Neil Lindsay stated within the announcement. “Well being AI within the One Medical app brings collectively all of the items of your private well being data to present you a extra full image—serving to you perceive your well being, and supporting you in getting the care it’s essential to get and keep effectively.”
Amazon says that its new Well being AI assistant can present “customized insights” that use a affected person’s lab outcomes, medical historical past, remedy data and different data to color a full image of their well being. Within the app, Well being AI will clarify lab outcomes, provide recommendation about signs, remedies, and different questions and assist sufferers guide appointments and renew drugs.
The AI will see you now
The One Medical AI assistant is powered by Amazon’s Bedrock AI fashions and follows related health-focused AI chatbots from main AI corporations. Earlier this month, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health, which equally synthesizes its customers’ medical historical past to supply tailor-made recommendation. Days later, Anthropic launched Claude for Healthcare, an AI chatbot that may analyze a consumer’s well being information to assist them make sense of check outcomes and prep questions for a physician’s appointment.
In contrast to its opponents, Amazon is already deeply invested within the enterprise of healthcare. The retail big jumped into the healthcare house in 2020 by launching its own online pharmacy, an providing that advanced from the corporate’s previous acquisition of well being startup PillPack.
Two years later, Amazon purchased main care and telehealth supplier One Medical for $3.9 billion, additional increasing its grand ambitions to develop into a longtime medical supplier. Amazon stored the One Medical branding and now operates a community of places throughout 19 main U.S. cities, with a telehealth service that reaches subscribers past these places.
In 2023, Amazon tied One Medical into its Amazon Prime memberships, providing the well being care subscription at a reduced $9 per 30 days to Prime customers. A One Medical membership covers the price of on-demand digital care via the service, together with telehealth appointments, and simplified look after widespread issues, like chilly and flu signs or allergy symptoms.
Amazon frames its new Well being AI chatbot as a “complementary” instrument that isn’t designed to switch the human relationship between affected person and supplier. That’s for one of the best, contemplating that AI assistants have a really patchy document on the subject of offering secure, correct well being recommendation.
Google’s often-questionable AI overviews, which seem on the high of search outcomes, have served up doubtlessly dangerous misinformation when prompted with well being queries like “what’s the regular vary for liver blood checks.” Google isn’t alone: a latest study from Mt. Sinai’s Icahn Faculty of Drugs discovered that standard AI chatbots are susceptible to hallucinating on the subject of medical data, integrating false data and confidently giving descriptions of remedies and situations that don’t exist.
