According to CNBC, Amazon is building a team that’s planning to do a deeper dive into the healthcare arena. Leaked earlier this month, the internal document suggests Amazon is creating a “health & wellness” team of over one dozen individuals.
What’s the plan? To take that Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Show or other Alexa voice-assisted device in your living room and turn it into a diabetes management tool or a means for new moms to seek medical advice, among other things. Of course they will need to work within the regulations of HIPAA, but this is an interesting foray into the already rapidly-growing digital health space.
“Amazon has numerous other projects underway that are focused on taking a slice of the multitrillion-dollar healthcare industry,” according to CNBC’s Eugene Kim. Their cloud-computing division has a team dedicated to health and pharmaceuticals. They are looking to get into drug distribution. And you may recall earlier this year the big announcement in conjunction with Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan targeted at improving healthcare services.
This venture by Amazon into the digital health space has us wondering: are our clients prepared for voice enabled search? Do their marketing teams know how to prepare for the changing ways consumers will use new devices to find and interact with their brand? For a good reference on how you can begin to maximize voice search – which Google states makes up a staggering 20% of its searches – check out, “How to Prepare Your Marketing Team for Mobile and Voice Search Takeover.”