NHS: Amazon

(asked on 19th December 2019) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether the contract with Amazon to share health data from the NHS was put out to competitive tender.


This question was answered on 7th January 2020

The agreement with Amazon is non-exclusive and we want to work with other organisations to arrange for the content to be provided on other home devices. There are currently over 2,000 other organisations using content from the National Health Service website.

This is a mutually beneficial collaboration that will enable greater numbers of people to access health information accredited by the NHS, helping to put people in control of their own healthcare. The information being provided to users of Alexa devices asking questions is already freely available through the NHS website. This is an alternative mechanism for delivering that information. Patients already use Alexa and other devices to search for information on a range of health issues. This agreement ensures that the information they receive from Alexa is medically verified by the NHS instead of from a range of other sources, such as non-United Kingdom websites.

NHS Digital and NHSX have built an interface (known technically as an API, or Application Programming Interface) to content on the NHS website so that other organisations can use it to make NHS information available through their own sites. It is freely available.

The service available through Alexa enables a greater number of people to access certified NHS information from a trusted source, instead of potentially misleading information from a range of worldwide websites where the information may not have been clinically assessed.


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