Amazon Adds Drug Information to its mHealth Platform for Alexa

A new mHealth partnership will give Amazon Alexa users detailed information on the drugs they’re taking, adding a new dimension of care management to digital health assistants.

Amazon announced the partnership today with First DataBank, the San Francisco-based provider of drug and medical device information. The deal will give Alexa users access to information provided by FDB clinicians on a wide variety of drugs, as well as precautions, interactions and side effects.

“People lead busy lives and voice provides a simple way to get helpful information about medications including side effects and drug interactions – for themselves and the people they care for – and this information will complement advice from their medical and pharmacy teams,” FDB President Bob Katter said in a press release. “Ultimately, we believe that more informed consumers will lead to improved medication adherence, the reduction of adverse drug events, and better patient outcomes.”

The partnership pushes new capabilities to a fast-growing connected health platform being used by home healthcare programs, senior and assisted living facilities and healthcare providers looking to add some depth to their post-discharge, chronic care management and remote patient monitoring services.

“Right now they’re working on interactive conversations with structured responses,” Chris Edwards, chief marketing and experience officer for Conversa, one of dozens of digital health companies jockeying for position in the market, told mHealthIntelligence in 2018. “They’re automated and can be personalized, and they make patients feel more engaged in their healthcare.”

Such capabilities could benefit Massachusetts-based Lowell General Hospital, which launched a pilot telehealth program late last year that sends knee replacement patients home after surgery with an Amazon Echo and mHealth platform developed by Frontive. The platform gives patients detailed information on their recovery process.

“When patients are heading home after surgery or were just prescribed their tenth daily medication, expecting them to fully grasp and recall the details around all of these instructions is unrealistic and sets them up for failure,” Anthony Jones, Frontive’s co-founder and CEO, said in a September 2019 press release announcing the launch of the company’s telehealth platform. “Today, too much patient information is organized and presented to reduce liability instead of supporting patients the way they actually experience recovery and health management. We're aiming to change this so that patients always feel supported and in control.”

Adding more data sources to these platforms not only improves the patient’s ability to manage care at home, but gives providers more to work with as they monitor and adjust home-based care programs.