Alexa's Latest Skill Manages Your Meds and Prescription Refills

Today, Amazon is making Alexa more useful for people who rely on medication by allowing the voice assistant to play an active role in filling prescriptions and reminding you to take your meds.

Posting on the Amazon blog, Rachel Jiang, head of Alexa Health & Wellness, explains how the feedback Amazon received from customers using Alexa for the past five years highlighted a trend. Apparently Alexa users were regularly asking the voice assistant to remind them to take their medication, so Amazon decided to take a more active role in the process through a new skill.

Amazon teamed up with autonomous pharmacy company Omnicell and pharmacy chain Giant Eagle in order to offer prescription refills alongside medication reminders and prescription information. For now, that means this new Alexa skill will be limited to customers of Giant Eagle, but Amazon is treating it as an "initial launch" and intends to "expand to additional pharmacies next year."

If you are a Giant Eagle customer, it means you can say to Alexa "Alexa, manage my medication" and "Alexa, refill my prescriptions." Setting up requires linking your Giant Eagle prescription with your Amazon account, which is achieved through the new Giant Eagle skill. Enable the skill and you're good to go.

Once setup, Alexa will walk you through your medication schedule. Once Alexa knows your schedule it can remind you when to take your meds, but also answer questions relating to their consumption, for example, you can ask "Alexa, what medication am I supposed to take right now?" It's also easy to update the schedule and inform Alexa you aren't taking specific medications anymore using voice commands.

Refill requests will be sent to the same location you last picked up your medication from, but the voice assistant can't currently update you on the status of a refill request. That can only be done by contacting the pharmacy directly.

Amazon is keen to point out your privacy is protected when opting to use Alexa for prescriptions. This new skill takes advantage of the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) skill environment Amazon setup earlier this year and the blog post states, "these medication management features use multiple layers of verification to ensure that only you are able to access your prescription information via Alexa."

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