The next time you’ve got an itchy throat and a stuffy nose, Amazon wants you to describe your symptoms to an AI chatbot deputized to do medicine.
On Wednesday, Amazon announced the launch of the new feature, inviting users who subscribe to its healthcare service to interact with an AI assistant for personalized medical advice. The chatbot is available now in the One Medical app, which patients can use to schedule appointments, message their primary care providers, and access their medical records.
“The U.S. healthcare experience is fragmented, with each provider seeing only parts of your health puzzle,” Amazon Health Services senior VP Neil Lindsay said in the announcement. “Health AI in the One Medical app brings together all the pieces of your personal health information to give you a more complete picture—helping you understand your health and supporting you in getting the care you need to get and stay well.”
Amazon says that its new Health AI assistant can provide “personalized insights” that use a patient’s lab results, medical history, medication information, and other records to paint a full picture of the person’s health. In the app, Health AI will explain lab results; offer advice about symptoms, treatments, and other questions; and help patients book appointments and renew medications.
The AI will see you now
The One Medical AI assistant is powered by Amazon’s Bedrock AI models and follows similar health-focused AI chatbots from major artificial intelligence companies. Earlier this month, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health, which similarly synthesizes its users’ medical history to provide tailored advice. Days later, Anthropic introduced Claude for Healthcare, an AI chatbot that can analyze a user’s health data to help the person make sense of test results and prep questions for a doctor’s appointment.
Unlike its competitors, Amazon is already deeply invested in the business of healthcare. The retail giant jumped into the healthcare space in 2020 by launching its own online pharmacy, an offering that evolved from the company’s previous acquisition of health startup PillPack.
Two years later, Amazon bought primary care and telehealth provider One Medical for $3.9 billion, further expanding its grand ambitions to become an established medical provider. Amazon kept the One Medical branding and now operates a network of locations across 19 major U.S. cities, with a telehealth service that reaches subscribers beyond those locations.
In 2023, Amazon tied One Medical into its Amazon Prime memberships, offering the healthcare subscription at a discounted $9 per month to Prime users. A One Medical membership covers the cost of on-demand virtual care through the service, including telehealth appointments and simplified care for common problems such as cold and flu symptoms or allergies.
Amazon frames its new Health AI chatbot as a “complementary” tool that isn’t designed to replace the human relationship between patient and provider. That’s for the best, considering that AI assistants have a very patchy record when it comes to providing safe, accurate health advice.
Google’s often-questionable AI overviews, which appear at the top of search results, have served up potentially dangerous misinformation when prompted with health queries like “What is the normal range for liver blood tests?”
Google isn’t alone: A recent study from Mt. Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine in New York City found that popular AI chatbots are prone to hallucinating when it comes to medical information, integrating false information and confidently giving descriptions of treatments and conditions that don’t exist.
