Tag: Alexa

Alexa’s HIPAA Compliance Shows A Move Toward Engaging People In Their Healthcare

By Don Brown, CEO, LifeOmic.

Don Brown

Amazon recently announced the availability of a HIPAA-eligible development environment for Alexa-enabled devices. This environment allows select developers to create healthcare “skills” or applications that enable voice-based access to personalized health information. Six healthcare companies are already operating in this new environment and have developed skills “designed to help customers manage a variety of healthcare needs at home simply using voice,” writes head of Alexa health and wellness, Rachel Jiang, in Amazon Alexa’s official announcement.

Amazon Alexa’s move to support handling of personalized health information, whether to make it easier for individuals to book a medical appointment, access hospital post-discharge instructions, provide recovery updates to physicians, check on the status of a prescription delivery or make better food choices based on their latest blood glucose measurements, is reflective of a broader movement of healthcare towards empowering the consumer. This is for good reason, because the traditional approach to healthcare is broken.

Despite astounding medical advances and technologies such as whole genome sequencing, modern health care systems aren’t helping people to live in a healthy state any longer than they did a decade ago. For example, the percentage of the U.S. population with diabetes has been steadily growing over the last decade, and the share of the world population with cancer has been stable or has risen over the past 30 years. Some of the health care problems that contribute to our stagnant health span, or the length of our disease-free lives, include unequal access to healthcare, top-down health care recommendations that don’t translate into people’s daily lives and lack of patient engagement outside of the clinic.

Popular technologies including health and fitness apps, wearables and virtual assistants, like Amazon Alexa, are forcing and enabling a revolution in healthcare. Amazon’s creation of a HIPAA-eligible environment for developers of Alexa-enabled device applications indicates that health care is moving out of the fortress of the hospital and the clinic and coming into each patient’s hands for their own control. It won’t be long before we will all be able to access our health data through devices like Alexa and mobile apps like Apple Healthkit and LifeOmic’s LIFE Extend health tracking app. This data will live more securely in the cloud and will help inform our day-to-day decisions about our health.

A voice-enabled move on precision health

Alexa’s HIPAA-eligible environment is one participant in the broader precision health movement. Precision health is a mission of most modern health care providers that involves intervening at the right time for the right patients in order to best treat and prevent disease. Precision health is practically impossible without individual patient engagement. Treating the right patient at the right time with the right drug or intervention requires having information about that person’s genome, environmental exposures, lifestyle factors, health barriers, existing health literacy and more. To not only collect this data from individuals but also to engage them in preventive screening, interventions and health behaviors that fit into their lives, providers need to meet patients where they are: on the go, not in the clinic.

The future of healthcare involves delivery of personalized health information and recommendations through smartphones and voice-enabled devices like Alexa that follow people throughout their homes and out of their doors on a daily basis. Virtual assistants that can help people more quickly and easily make decisions that are best for their health are particularly exciting. People are turning to AI assistants to help them reduce their stress, pick the right nutrition plan and more.

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Amazon Alexa Is Now HIPAA Eligible: What’s Next?

Image result for amazon alexa logoAmazon announced that a version of their virtual assistant technology, Alexa, is now HIPAA-eligible. This means it’s available for applications that are subject to the data privacy and security requirements of HIPAA. The new HIPAA-eligible version of Alexa, specifically the Alexa Skills Kit, is now available to a limited number of developers by invitation only.

Why?

Amazon has seen increasing interest in Alexa’s potential to serve as a virtual healthcare assistant. While devices like PCs, tablets, and smartphones have contributed to advances in healthcare, they’ve been problematic for some aspects of patient engagement – particularly among the elderly and others who physically cannot – or will not – use them.

The idea of a smart, always-available, hands-free, voice-powered virtual assistant that can answer questions, deliver medication reminders, facilitate communication with one’s doctor, provide health coaching, and more, has piqued the interest of the healthcare communityAmazon has responded.

What’s different

Until now, Alexa’s use in healthcare has been mostly limited to question answering services – voice appsor “skills” in Alexa parlance, that answer general questions about health conditions, treatments, symptoms, etcAmazon Echo users, for example, can access health benefit information from a skill like Answers by Cigna, or tap into one of many symptom checkers in the Alexa marketplace. The big change is that Alexa can now be used in certain applications that collect and transmit protected health information (PHI).

This opens a whole new world of voice applications beyond basic Q&A, such as remote patient monitoring population health, medication adherence and clinical trial optimization. It seemed inevitable that voice assistants like Alexa and smart speaker-equipped devices like the Amazon Echo would find their way into clinical applications. Amazon’s announcement confirms this.

Beware

Organizations must understand the full range of issues surrounding the “what, why and how” of securing, voice-first healthcare applications. HIPAA is just the start. There is no formal certification process for HIPAA, and it applies only in the U.S. Also, many healthcare IT departments use other industry standards or ?have created their own standards for data privacy and security. In their eyes, completely securing a voice application may go well beyond ensuring that a service provider will sign a HIPAA business associate agreement. Issues like user authentication, data privacy in shared spaces, network and device hacking, secure system integration (e.g. with an EHR), should all be addressed.  Continue Reading