Amazon has partnered with numerous universities and medical facilities to expand its footprint in the health tech industry.
Below is a timeline of some of Amazon's most notable partnerships, as covered by Becker's Hospital Review in the past six months.
Oct. 12, 2020: Amazon teamed up with Carrier Global, a refrigeration and cold chain company, to improve how medicine, vaccines and other goods are moved and monitored globally.
Oct. 13, 2020: Amazon Web Services, Accenture and Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. entered into a strategic agreement to modernize Takeda's digital platforms and grow the company's data services.
Oct. 21, 2020: Newark, Del.-based ChristianaCare developed an Alexa skill for home health, dubbed Home Care Coach. It is a care plan delivered as a voice-driven capability, or skill, via Amazon's digital assistant Alexa. Providers can customize a patient's care plan, and then the patient can ask Alexa questions about the plan and prescriptions.
Nov. 2, 2020: A direct-to-consumer partnership between Centerville, Ohio-based consulting firm Healthcare Advisory Network and Wooster, Ohio-based national prescription and telemedicine program BasiCare Plus began offering memberships to zero-copay telemedicine with free prescription drugs through Amazon.
Dec. 21, 2020: Amazon, CVS Health and Thermo Fisher Scientific formed a coalition focused on promoting employer-based COVID-19 testing as part of a national strategy to combat the pandemic.
Jan. 5, 2021: Clearwater, Fla.-based BayCare Health System began deploying Amazon Alexa devices in 2,500 rooms across its 14 hospitals.
Jan. 24, 2021: Amazon teamed up with Seattle-based health system Virginia Mason to establish a pop-up COVID-19 vaccination site.
Feb. 16, 2021: Amazon was in talks with the Biden administration to assist with the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. The retail giant has been pitching its IT and operations capabilities to help with vaccine distribution, such as coordinating and delivering doses to churches, clinics and corner pharmacies to reach more people.
Feb. 25, 2021: Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh developed a new machine learning tool to be used in clinical forecasting, according to a study supported by Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
March 3, 2021: Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare, St. Louis-based Ascension and Amazon Care teamed up as founding members of a new healthcare coalition aimed at expanding home-based clinical care.
March 9, 2021: Amazon and the University of Washington in Seattle teamed up to develop a contactless way to screen for irregular heartbeats using Amazon's smart speaker Alexa.
Change Healthcare and Amazon Web Services announced they are launching a new data science-as-a-service offering that provides de-identified claims data integrated with social determinants of health for more robust data analytics and research on vulnerable patient populations.
March 10, 2021: Moving Health Home, a new healthcare coalition formed to expand home-based clinical care, added Amwell to the list of its founding members alongside Amazon Care, Intermountain, Ascension and others.
March 30, 2021: New Hyde Park, N.Y.-based Northwell Health is expanding a program to equip COVID-19 patients' rooms with Amazon Echo Show devices, which feature two-way video calling capabilities that let clinicians check on patients via video, CNN reports.
April 9, 2021: Pittsburgh-based UPMC and Milwaukee-based Advocate Aurora Health are the two latest health systems to join Moving Health Home, a new healthcare coalition founded by Amazon Care, Intermountain and Ascension.