Amazon’s personal voice assistant Alexa can now answer simple questions about drugs and their side effects due to a partnership with drug and medical knowledge provider First Databank (FDB).
The initiative will leverage a customised subset of FDB’s clinical drug information, which is already used by healthcare professionals for more than 40 years.
Customers will be able to ask about a drug’s effects, side effects, precautions, and the drug’s class.
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Amazon’s Alexa became HIPAA-compliant in April last year (i.e. met the standards for sensitive patient data protection set by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), which currently sets it apart from competitors Google and Microsoft – both of which are also actively competing to disrupt the health-tech market.
This is one of a series of healthcare-related skills the company has since added to its cloud-based home assistant – usually through partnerships with health IT companies such as the above – which shows that concerns from privacy advocates around the sensitive nature of medical data do not seem to be slowing the company (or its competitors) down.
In response to these concerns, Amazon said that Alexa users can review and delete their voice records alongside several other privacy controls.
