Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what monitoring arrangements in relation to (1) patient confidentiality, (2) intellectual property, and (3) other data, have been built into the agreement to share NHS health data with Amazon.

The agreement between the Department and Amazon is clear that none of the data generated will be shared with third parties; that it will not be used for selling products or making product recommendations to Amazon users; nor is it building any form of health profiles on Amazon customers.

NHS Digital are working closely with Amazon to assess the effectiveness of the service. The algorithm used by Amazon is still learning and will be updated continuously to learn how people are asking questions about health conditions.

All information is treated with high confidentiality and Amazon use multi-factor authentication to restrict access, service encryption, and audits of our control environment to protect it. No Amazon employee has direct access to information that can identify the person or account, and Amazon have the appropriate measures in place to ensure General Data Protection Regulation compliance.

Patients already use Alexa and other devices to search for health information on a range of health issues. This agreement ensures that the information they receive from Alexa is medically verified by the National Health Service instead of from a range of other sources, such as non-United Kingdom websites.

This agreement is not exclusive. There are over 2,000 other organisations that are accessing and using information from the NHS website in a similar way.