We have openly proposed at DocToDoctor project that if we do not take care of our patient’s data there will be others who will get for themselves. Several published news offer insights of the wide plan Amazon is developing related to Health. One of the best contribution I’ve read is the Jo Best’s column at ZDNet.

Initially they have created a joint venture with J.P. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway to redefine health care to the one million workers  the three companies bring together. But the team created does not seem designed to stay in that niche.

In addition, Amazon has both hardware and software projects related to Health. Last year the they announced that their Natural Language Processor would be extended to medical records, a service that would allow health care providers to extract information from medical notes, and understand the medical jargon they contain. We have to remember it’s a cloud service.

But even further, there are plans for Alexa to extract medical information during the conversation at a medical appointment, and upload it to the consultation record. The author of the article points out the small “big drawback”: Alexa does not comply with the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), the North American law that limits the use or disclosure of protected health-related information to a minimum necessary standard. According to the author, once Amazon gets Alexa certified as compliant with the law, and then can be used to process identifiable health data, a wide range of easy to visualize possibilities would be opened, from the care of chronic patients such as care of dependents.

European’s GPDR is much stricter than HIPAA, since it tries to prevent the identification of the subject by means of data triangulation; it was the reason why DocToDoctor has not yet chosen to offer cloud AI services for the classification of clinical material, a real need that we have all the health professionals. We will add it when the device itself can take care of the whole process. Presumptively European Authorities are aware of the lobby efforts to bend the law to a more relaxed situation but have staid firm.

The final question is whether we can fight Amazon to maintain our patients health data away from commercial interests. Those of us who believe that it should be possible, are at the mercy of the elements.

Using DocToDoctor, if you need to save data and photos of clinical processes on your mobile, is the way to support an ethical initiative of self-management of medical information by members of the profession.

Beware of the rain