As more and more people turn to chatbots for advice about their health and wellness, Amazon is betting that it can provide an effective, clinically grounded tool.
This week, the company expanded access to an AI-powered health assistant developed with its primary care arm, One Medical. The tool debuted earlier this year for One Medical members, but now anyone can access the chatbot through Amazon’s app or website.
The service is designed to answer routine 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’s primary care data.
If a user’s question requires a licensed clinician, the assistant routes them into One Medical’s pay-per-visit channel, which handles about 30 common conditions via message-based care. Prime members can get five of these visits for free.
People have been using the tool for a wide range of questions and requests, noted Andrew Diamond, One Medical’s chief medical officer, during an interview Tuesday at the HIMSS conference in Las Vegas.
Users are booking appointments, renewing prescriptions, evaluating their symptoms and deciding whether to see a doctor and understanding their lab results, he said. If the user grants permission, the tool can also access their health records to help identify trends related to treatments.
“People are asking lots of really good questions that would, in many cases, require them to see or message a clinician. And while this by no means replaces a clinical viewpoint, it helps people figure out whether they really do need to see a human clinician. It has the potential to make the more straightforward types of healthcare questions much more accessible to a huge number of people — and simultaneously alleviate what would otherwise be somewhat low-value or even distracting or frustrating work for clinicians,” Diamond explained.
The goal is similar to those expressed by Anthropic and OpenAI, who kicked off this year announcing healthcare-focused large language models for consumers. These pushes into healthcare were inevitable, given hundreds of millions of people per week were turning to these companies’ chatbots to answer their health-related inquiries.
In Diamond’s view, the trend of people increasingly asking healthcare questions to generative AI models is mostly positive because it encourages people to be engaged in their health and seek care.
Patients are often coming into visits more informed as a result of what they learned from AI. That can make conversations more productive, allowing clinicians to focus more on recommendations and less on basic explanations, Diamond explained.
“Most people that interact with AI in a primary care clinic are not finding that their interaction with a physician has been replaced. They’re often coming in, particularly for the most sensitive topics, and they’re saying, ‘Well, here’s what I learned from AI, but here’s what I need you to help me understand,’” he stated.
As more people chat with AI about their health, companies are positioning these tools to lead patients toward the next step in care. Amazon’s assistant is one example of how that shift could begin to remodel the front end of the healthcare system.
Photo: Witthaya Prasongsin, Getty Images
