Amazon Launches Virtual Health Service With Amazon Clinic
Amazon is launching a virtual healthcare service to deliver care for 20 common conditions. Called ‘Amazon Clinic’, the virtual consultation service will require no video visit or live chat. It will use a message-based portal on the platform to allow customers to select their condition from a list provided, and then choose a preferred provider from a list of third-party licensed clinicians, including ones from SteadyMD and HealthTap.
After completing a short intake questionnaire, customers and third-party clinicians directly connect via the message-based portal within hours of the initial request.
A personalized treatment plan will then be delivered via the same portal. Customers can fill their medication at their preferred pharmacy or at Amazon Pharmacy.
The platform is expected to deliver care for 20 common conditions like heartburn, acne, dandruff and seasonal allergies.
The clinic is set to operate in 32 states in the US. While the costs of the consultations will vary, patients will be provided up-front pricing. Customers can follow up with the provider for up to two weeks after the initial evaluation.
AEYE Health Gets FDA Approval to Screen Diabetics to Prevent Blindness
AEYE Health, an Israeli digital health firm, announced that it has received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance to ‘market its screening system to detect damage to the retina of the eyes in diabetics.’
The FDA approval came in after the success of their Phase III clinical trial results from last February.
As per the report, ‘AEYE takes images from each eye, using a special desktop camera and through artificial intelligence, it captures and analyses data of the retina that helps diagnose diseases, including diabetes, that could lead to blindness.’
Screening diabetics for retinopathy, or damaged retinas, has recently become reimbursable in the US, as it is a leading cause of blindness in the working age and 90% of such vision loss could be avoided with early detection and treatment.
AEYE is also advancing a follow-on program for the screening of glaucomatous optic neuropathy and expects to start FDA pivotal trials soon.
Mayo Clinic Launches Digital Referee for Spotting Potential Bias in Healthcare AI Programs
With an aim to address some of the scepticism about implementing AI programs in healthcare and diagnostics, Mayo Clinic has announced the launch of a new product for healthcare tech developers that can help detect potential biases within their AI models.
Named ‘Platform_Validate’, the program is designed to put an algorithm’s credibility to the test. It will also act as a third party to confirm the AI’s efficacy in meeting its intended clinical purpose.
The scepticism about implementing AI programs in healthcare often pertains to the fact that ‘programs may inadvertently reinforce inequities in the current system, by underlining disparities present in potentially poor-quality data used to construct and train the algorithm in the first place.’ Mayo Clinic hopes some of the standard reports on specificity and sensitivity will help fight the initial bias.
Platform_Validate measures for model bias in categories including age and ethnicity. The hope is that it can describe how an AI algorithm would perform in different scenarios, such as when faced with varying demographics across race, gender and socioeconomic status.
Platform_Validate will join Mayo’s previous Platform_Discover service, which provides ‘AI engineers with curated and de-identified health data for model development, training and testing.’
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