Amazon’s Creep Into Health Care Has Some Experts Spooked

“Whenever health data is concerned, we have to be very suspicious,” says Sandra Wachter, a professor at the University of Oxford who researches the legal and ethical implications of AI, big data, and robotics. “Everybody has an interest in learning more about the health of people.” Wachter points out that while Amazon having access to your data may not pose a risk right at this moment, no one knows what will change down the road. Look, she says, at what happened to period-tracking apps when Roe v. Wade was overturned: What started out as a supposedly empowering way for women to take charge of their own health data turned into a risk that this data could be used to determine whether a person had terminated a pregnancy.

Smith told WIRED that Amazon keeps patient health information confidential and secure in compliance with federal law and regulations, and in line with industry standards; Amazon Clinic customer data will be protected through the use of HIPAA-compliant encryption methods. “Protecting patient information is an important part of our business; we are not in the business of selling or sharing it,” Smith wrote.

Amazon’s recent efforts to break into health care raise a more fundamental question: Should Big Tech even be allowed in the sector? The motivations of a private company—efficiency, optimization, and above all, profit—don’t exactly square with serving the public good, says Tamar Sharon, a professor at Radboud University in the Netherlands whose work explores the politics and ethics of Big Tech in health and medicine—or as she dubs it, the “Googlization of health.” 

Amazon Care, a telehealth service Amazon piloted among its employees and then rolled out to other customers, shows how things can go wrong. Its shutdown was announced a few months ago, with the senior vice president in charge of the program, Neil Lindsay, writing in an internal memo Amazon shared with WIRED: “Although our enrolled members have loved many aspects of Amazon Care, it is not a complete enough offering for the large enterprise customers we have been targeting, and wasn’t going to work long-term.”  

But it was plagued by other problems, too. A Washington Post investigation alleged that moving at top speed and efficiency sometimes conflicted with best practices in medicine: For example, nurses were asked to process patient blood samples in their personal cars, the paper reported, and to store and dispose of medical supplies at home, which they protested. (Amazon told the Post that they could not find records of complaints about these matters.)  

“Amazon Care followed common practices for in-home care and know them to be safe and appropriate,” Smith told WIRED. “For example, Amazon Care clinicians were always equipped with Stericycle medical waste return equipment to properly and securely return or dispose of supplies.” 

For Sharon, a big concern is how reliant we risk becoming on big companies as mediators of fundamental public needs. “This is a dangerous situation—that we would become dependent on a handful of private actors for the distribution of very basic goods, like health, or education, or public services,” she says. For instance, as these companies increasingly fund and perform their own research, it’s possible they could influence how the research agenda is set. That could be a problem if tech founders’ penchant for wanting to live forever results in a focus on funding longevity research over, say, cancer treatments.