Editor’s note: Matt Arnold is principal analyst at DRG Digital – Manhattan Research, New York. This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared under the title, “Pharma’s next play: Pill-plus-skill?”
With the recent headlines that Amazon has HIPAA-proofed Alexa, voice applications for health are back in the news. The first crop of HIPAA-compliant Alexa Skills, from a select group of six developer partners, includes apps for checking blood glucose readings (from Livongo), navigating an employee wellness program (Cigna), scheduling appointments with HCPs (Boston Children’s Hospital, Providence St. Joseph Health and Atrium Health) and tracking mail-order prescriptions (Express Scripts).
As the main U.S. law governing privacy of personal medical information, HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) has been a barrier to the development of voice apps that can aid in patient care. The potential use cases, for everything from hands-free medical information to medical adherence tools, are many and promising. For pharma, it’s an obvious opportunity to add value through medication reminders and other types of patient support resources, and to inform patients about their products at key points in the medical decision-making process. However, given the regulatory hurdle posed by HIPAA, I had expected pharma’s initial ventures into voice tech to focus on applications for HCPs.
There have been a few forays by pharma into patient-directed Alexa Skills so far – notably Pfizer’s It’s Your Wellness, Own It. Skill and J&J’s Zyrtec-branded Your Daily AllergyCast – but these pioneers have understandably played it safe, steering a wide berth around sensitive medical topics or patient information. Amazon’s progress could change that equation.
Who will be the first in pharma to launch a HIPAA-sensitive Alexa skill for patients? For now, Amazon’s HIPAA-compliant app dev program is invite-only, but that club is sure to expand quickly. Already, nearly one in four U.S. patients (23 percent) say they are likely to use a voice app from a pharma, per DRG Digital’s 2018 patient research, while one in five voice assistant users say they would use Alexa, Siri, Cortana, etc., to stay on top of their medication.
In fact, DRG Digital study findings suggest that patients are already seeking treatment information through voice queries – one quarter of voice assistant users in the U.S. say they’ve tried to access side effect info via voice search, while 20 percent have sought information on treatments available for their condition through voice search. Another 13 percent have asked a voice assistant for information on how to take a treatment.
In our 2018 U.S. patient research, Alexa was the second most-used voice assistant (behind Siri), with 18 percent of U.S. adults surveyed saying they’d used Alexa and another 22 percent expressing interest in doing so. Perhaps surprisingly, given data breach headlines, only 18 percent of patients who have used voice assistants say they wouldn’t use them for health information because of concerns about the security of their personal health data. This openness on the part of patients indicates the enormous potential of well-designed voice apps to boost adherence, better inform patients and improve patient health.