TECHNOLOGY
Dr. Alexa?
What Amazon might do in health care
WRITTEN BY ELIZABETH WEISE AND KEVIN McCOY
SUCHARITA MULPURU
AN AMAZON ANALYST
WITH FORRESTER
RESEARCH
P
aging Dr. Alexa? As
the U.S. health care
industry shifts, Amazon
is quietly moving in
directions that suggest
the company may be
planning to deliver prescriptions,
not just books, clothes and other
merchandise.
“It’s entirely likely Amazon will
play a role in health care. They’re a
company that’s been very disruptive
to multiple industries," says Wendell
Potter, a health care industry critic.
“I bet you they’ve been looking at
health care for some time. There are
opportunities there for them.”
Experts and analysts say they can easily see
a place for an “Amazon-like company” in the
health care market. “A lot of [health care]
companies are already looking to see what they
can learn from Amazon,” says Marcus Ehrhardt,
partner of the consulting firm PwC’s pharma and
life sciences division.
Could U.S. consumers one day find themselves
logging in to Amazon Health Care Prime, or
asking Dr. Alexa — Amazon’s popular Echo
home assistance device uses a digital voice
answering to the name Alexa — what they
should do about their cough?
A complex market
The licenses Amazon has so far sought are far
from what’s needed to begin shipping drugs to
consumers. They give it the ability to sell medical
professional-use-only products such as sutures,
ultrasound gel and syringes for use in medical and
dental offices or hospitals, the company says.
Neither Amazon nor any other online seller can
just put drugs next to toys, books and household
staples in its warehouses and ship them all in the
same box to homes due to complex, state-based
regulations around prescriptions, says Ehrhardt.
But Amazon does have expertise that makes it a
natural candidate to find ways to reform the U.S.
health care industry as it tries to control costs, says
Gil Irwin, PwC strategy and health care partner.
42
2018 EDITION | (201) HEALTH
Seattle-based Amazon excels at
analyzing data and then using that
information to motivate customers,
he notes. Amazon, for example,
might see that a customer has bought
cough drops every week for the last
month, and went to the doctor for a
cold six weeks before but never filled
his prescription. Amazon, or an
“Amazon-like company,” could use
that kind of insight to encourage
consumers to go back to the doctor,
or drop by a nearby clinic for a nurse
practitioner to examine them, Irwin
says. “That could help solve the
problem of getting the wrong care,”
and could lower expenses overall.
Dr. Alexa, I presume?
Potter, who launched Tarbell.com, a site that
focuses on corporate influence over health care,
can see a role for Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa.
His first job in health care was setting up a hotline
for a hospital so patients could ask a nurse to
diagnose their symptoms and get advice on what
to do.
“Why can’t Alexa do that?” Potter asks.
While patients would have to understand that
Alexa is neither doctor nor nurse, it could be a
helpful way to get them talking to the right person,
or to get the right information to them quickly
simply by asking questions, he says.
Amazon’s possible entry into health care is an
equally intriguing and terrifying thought, says
Sucharita Mulpuru, an Amazon analyst with
Forrester Research. “One day, we could tell Echo
our ailments and have recommendations and
potentially some drug recommendations, which
they could fulfill if they also have doctors available
in live chat on an Echo Show device,” she says.
The missing link for Amazon now is doctors
and prescribers, both of whom represent huge
regulatory and logistical hurdles.
“The medical world is still highly fragmented
and it won’t be a trivial task to tackle this,
but that’s not to say it won’t happen,”
Mulpuru says. ❖
“ONE DAY, WE
COULD TELL
ECHO OUR
AILMENTS AND
HAVE RECOM-
MENDATIONS,
AND POTEN-
TIALLY SOME
DRUG RECOM-
MENDATIONS,
[FULFILLED
IF THERE
ARE ALSO]
DOCTORS
AVAILABLE IN
LIVE CHAT ON
AN ECHO…
DEVICE.”