Doctor Alexa

Amazon’s Alexa called on to help patients in the UK

Last week, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) announced that it’s teaming up with Amazon to provide medical advice to patients through the Alexa personal assistant. The use of voice search has been growing rapidly as smart speakers proliferate. In fact, some estimates have it that by 2020, half of all searches will be made using voice-assisted technology.

Furthermore, at CCS Insight’s Predictions event last year, we predicted that by 2021, it will be possible to talk to almost every new connected consumer device sold in Western markets, given the strong recent progress in speech recognition, alongside greater integration with personal assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa.

NHSX, the digital arm of the NHS launched earlier in July 2019, is pioneering the Alexa service as part of its broader aim to make certain health services available to patients digitally. It has assembled a team from the Department of Health and Social Care, NHS England and NHS Improvement into one unit to foster digital transformation.

As part of the NHS’s long-term plan to make some services available digitally, users will soon be able to ask Alexa basic questions like “Alex, how do I treat a migraine?” or “Alexa, what are the symptoms of chickenpox?”. Alexa will then answer with information drawn directly from the NHS website. By being given official NHS information, users are less likely to come across inaccurate or unprofessional medical advice. Anyone who’s ever Googled symptoms knows what a minefield doing so can be.

The voice-assisted service will answer questions about common medical ailments, such as migraines, flu and chickenpox. It’s hoped the initiative will help take pressure off doctors and other NHS services. The service is expected to help patients, particularly the elderly and blind, who can’t access the Internet through traditional means and find searching online to be a difficult experience.

This partnership with NHS is just another of Amazon’s many recent efforts to expand in healthcare. In 2018, the company agreed to buy US-based online pharmacy PillPack (see US Healthcare Gets a Dose of Amazon). Amazon was also granted a US patent that would allow Alexa to detect when a user is ill by analysing speech, and suggest a shipment of cough drops.

UK Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock said in a statement that, “We want to empower every patient to take better control of their healthcare and technology like this is a great example of how people can access reliable, world-leading NHS advice from the comfort of their home, reducing the pressure on our hardworking GPs and pharmacists”.

The news of the service has prompted worry among privacy advocates that the information could be misused. However, to allay their fears, Amazon says it won’t share any health data from the NHS programme with third parties, nor will it sell or recommend products based on this information. Amazon also adds that it won’t use this information to build customer health profiles, and plans to treat the information as highly confidential.

We believe this is a positive step in how people will interact with a wide range of services in the future, and it’s encouraging to see the UK health service taking the initiative. This is undoubtedly the first of many similar moves to come, as new technology capabilities intersect with health needs.