Like more and more people turn to chatbots for advice on their health and well-being, Amazon bets that it can provide an effective and clinically based tool.
This week, the company expanded access to an AI-powered healthcare assistant developed with its primary care arm, A medical. The tool debuted earlier this year for One Medical members, but now anyone can access the chatbot through the app or Amazon’s website.
The service is designed to answer common health questions, help patients interpret medical information and guide them to the appropriate level of care when needed. It was trained and tested using hundreds of thousands of synthetic medical conversations based on One Medical primary care data.
If a user’s question requires a licensed clinician, the assistant routes them to One Medical’s pay-per-visit channel, which manages about 30 common conditions through message-based care. Prime members can get five of these tours for free.
People have used the tool for a wide range of questions and requests, noted Andrew Diamond, One Medical’s chief medical officer, in an interview Tuesday at HIMSS Conference in Las Vegas.
Users make appointments, refill their prescriptions, assess their symptoms, decide whether to see a doctor and understand their lab results, he said. If the user grants permission, the tool can also access their health records to help identify treatment trends.
“People are asking a lot of really good questions that, in many cases, would require them to consult or message a clinician. And while this is in no way a substitute for a clinical perspective, it does help people determine whether they really need to consult a human clinician. This has the potential to make the simplest types of health questions much more accessible to a large number of people – and at the same time alleviate what would otherwise be low-value, or even distracting or frustrating work for clinicians,” Diamond explained.
The objective is similar to those expressed by Anthropic and OpenAI, which started this year announcing major healthcare-focused language models for consumers. These advances in healthcare were inevitable, given that hundreds of millions of people turned to these companies’ chatbots every week to answer their health-related inquiries.
According to Diamond, the trend of people increasingly asking generative AI models about healthcare questions is quite positive because it encourages people to get involved in their health and seek care.
Patients often arrive at visits more informed because of what they have learned through AI. This can make conversations more productive, allowing clinicians to focus more on recommendations and less on basic explanations, Diamond explained.
“Most people who interact with AI in a primary care clinic don’t find that their interaction with a doctor has been replaced. They often come, especially for the most sensitive topics, and say, ‘Well, here’s what I learned from AI, but here’s what I need you to help me understand,'” he said.
As more people discuss their health with AI, companies are positioning these tools to guide patients to the next stage of care. Amazon’s Assistant is an example of how this change could begin to reshape the front end of the healthcare system.
Photo: Witthaya Prasongsin, Getty Images