Amazon will be rolling out a medication management feature for millions of Alexa owners as the e-commerce giant continues to expand its footprint in the healthcare market. The feature which will be rolled out this week will enable Alexa to remind users when to take their medicines.
The e-commerce giant has been lately trying to explore the growing healthcare market and the recent move is in a bid to give millions of its Alexa users another facility. Alexa has already emerged as a game changer in the connected home devices segment and is aggressively competing with the likes of Google and Apple.
Initially, the facilities will be available to customers of Giant Eagle, a pharmacy with a sizeable present in the East Coast and Midwest. Amazon has partnered with Giant Eagle for the new feature, which will be available in more than 200 locations initially.
How the feature works
The new feature, which will be available to Alexa users in 200 locations across West Virginia, Ohio, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Indiana, has been designed in such a way that it will allow it to directly integrate with both PillPack and Amazon Care, according to Tech Crunch.
All Alexa users with an active prescription can access the new feature their Alexa app that will give reminder on the prescription drugs. In order to use the new medication management tool, users will be first required to enable the Giant Eagle pharmacy skills and link it to their accounts.
Amazon's decision to roll out the new feature comes after the company saw that a large number of Alexa owners were using its reminder systems and other feedback features.
Amazon continues to innovate
Amazon has been long planning to capture a bigger share of the booming healthcare market that is touted to be around $3.5 trillion. However, healthcare despite being a lucrative market is an intricate zone given the number of regulations and private policies around managing sensitive health information.
That said, earlier this year, the e-commerce giant had announced that Alexa is Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act compliant. This definitely will ease a lot of things for the company.
In 2018, the company bought PillPack, a start-up and last month it acquired another start-up Health Navigator. At the same time, it has been aggressively competing with rivals Google and Apple in the home devices segment. Amazon now wants to use it home device integrated it new medication management feature to expand in both the markets.
