Amazon Health Service’s chief medical officer says it’s unreasonable to keep customers in the dark about how much their medication will cost until they reach the checkout—and that’s the problem her team is hoping to rectify.
At Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference in London this week, Dr. Sunita Mishra said priorities for Amazon’s health care offering included transparency and ensuring customers’ trust.
Part of that, the Wharton School graduate said, is making sure there are no nasty surprises for consumers when it comes to paying for their essential medication.
“In the U.S. oftentimes you don’t know how much something’s going to cost until you get to the counter and then you get a surprise bill,” she explained. “We just didn’t feel like that was an experience that was acceptable.”
Amazon has doubled down on its expansion into the health care space following its purchase of primary-care company One Medical in 2022 for $3.9 billion.
In his shareholder letter released last week, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy made it clear health care would continue to form the foundations for the company’s growth moving forward.
He wrote that over the past 10 years, the company tried “several health experiments” which have culminated in the creation of “several important building blocks to help transform the customer health experience.”
The CEO of the Jeff Bezos–founded business added: “Because of our growing success, Amazon customers are now asking us to help them with all kinds of wellness and nutrition opportunities—which can be partially unlocked with some of our existing grocery building blocks, including Whole Foods Market or Amazon Fresh.”
Mishra said Amazon’s health team was using large language models to help bring “lots of transparency” to the pricing of medication.
On top of that, the health care expert—who practiced as a primary care physician for more than 20 years—said Amazon was using AI to improve the workload of medics to give them time back with patients.
When asked about how the company—which has a market cap of $1.9 trillion—will look to scale its medical services, Mishra said: “We think artificial intelligence and generative models are going to be really valuable because if we can remove some of those things that clinicians don’t need to do, they’re going to be able to spend more time taking care of more patients. And so I think that’s the real opportunity to scale.”
“With size and scale comes responsibility”
Mishra said Amazon—which serves hundreds of millions of customers worldwide and employs tens of thousands of people—is also mindful of the powerful part it is playing in a highly sensitive industry.
And when it comes to integrating AI into health care offerings—an opportunity that has prompted warnings from the World Health Organization (WHO)—the stakes are even higher.
The Seattle-based company added a wider leadership principle in 2021, which will guide thinking when it comes to managing how the groundbreaking tech will be used: “With size and scale comes responsibility,” Mishra said.
“We never take for granted a single day that we have our customers’ trust. And I think that is even more so true in health care given the responsibility.”
Mindfulness of responsibility has seeped into how the company has designed its AI services, the medic continued, with checks built in to ensure safety, privacy, fairness, and accuracy.
Counter to the WHO’s fears, Mishra said AI could also present something of a do-over for biases already built into the health care sector.
Until 1993 in the U.S., she pointed out, female participants weren’t required by law to be included in clinical trials.
“There’s bias in our health care system today,” Mishra said.
“So I think there’s an opportunity there for us to partner with other health systems, other people in the ecosystem, to be mindful of that.”
