Amazon’s Secret Lab Will Challenge Apple in the Health Sector

Amazon has seemingly conquered every business it has entered, from book-selling to retailing and groceries. The company recently inked a $13.4 billion deal to purchase Whole Foods, and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, briefly supplanted Bill Gates as the world’s richest man. Now, it’s been revealed that the e-retailing giant has a secret lab dedicated to healthcare research dubbed 1492– ostensibly a reference to the year Columbus landed in the Americas. CNBC reports that the experimental lab is based in Seattle and is running ongoing projects in both health hardware and software.

One of the projects detailed in the report involves tapping into the electronic records of medical providers and making troves of data available to patients and doctors. Other efforts are aimed at building out a telemedicine platform for virtual consultations.

1492 is also testing the waters for health applications for Amazon products like Echo. Physicians and hospitals have already begun experimenting with various uses for Amazon Echo’s voice recognition technology, such as creating voice check-lists for surgeons and transmitting medical information to patients.

“There are some massive voice applications that will be built for health enterprises,” John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital, told CNBC.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Amazon Web Services is competing with Google to provide cloud services to hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, while its retail arm has snapped up a sizeable portion of the medical supply distribution business.

Amazon vs Apple

These ambitions put Amazon directly at odds with Apple, which is also vying for primacy in the healthcare space. It’s been reported that Apple has hired dozens of healthcare experts to help build advanced electronic health record software to make it easier to analyze medical information and share it between hospitals.

Apple has already made it possible for users to store medical records from providers in their iPhones via HealthKit. Apple eventually seeks to make the iPhone an all-in-one hub for health information shared between doctors and patients, logging everything from doctor’s visits to prescriptions to lab test results.

The company has also developed ResearchKit, software that is aimed at simplifying clinical trials for drugmakers and researchers. It has partnered with major institutions like Johns Hopkins University and GlaxoSmithKline to work on delivering clinical data gathered from wearable Apple Watches to researchers.

“Apple is working hard with many of these large institutions to generate tools that are medically correct, to take data from sensors,” said Scott Jenkins, CEO of Certainty Health LLC to Bloomberg. “They want to be the repository, the open collection space.”

However, both tech companies face difficulties in the lucrative health space– namely, lack of patient interest. Experts have found that patients aren’t interested enough in accessing their health data.

“At any given time, only about 10 to 15 percent of patients care about this stuff,” said Micky Tripathi, CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, to CNBC.

It’s the very problem that stymied the efforts of Google Health to provide a centralized hub to store and manage all of your health information. Google shuttered its operations in 2011, citing a lack of “broad impact”.