The UK\'s National Health Service is letting patients ask Alexa for medical advice

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The UK's National Health Service (NHS) announced a partnership with Amazon to offer official NHS medical advice to patients through a free skill available to anyone who owns an Alexa-enabled device, per The Guardian.

The NHS highlighted the new skill as particularly valuable for blind and elderly patients who may have difficulties accessing medical advice online. The NHS also thinks the service could reduce patient demand for care: Over 6 million patientscame through NHS emergency rooms between April 2017 and Mach 2018, a 42% increase over 2006 figures.

The partnership should fortify Amazon's position as the UK's favorite smart speaker and ensure the NHS reaches a broad audience with its digital services:

Third-party partnerships will likely remain a critical piece of Amazon's healthcare strategy for Alexa as it looks to fend off the looming threat of Google Assistant. Amazon reigns supreme in the smart speaker market, but in terms of all other smart devices Google Assistant takes the cake with nearly 1 billion devices worldwide compared with Alexa's 100 million.

Google Assistant was also shown to be the most reliablevoice assistant when it comes to providing basic information about medications. However, Amazon's NHS partnership doesn't require Alexa to know everything on its own; instead it will be using a specially developed skill to pull information directly from the NHS.

Amazon has developed Alexa to be a near-ubiquitous platform - built directly into more than 150 devices and compatible with over 28,000 more from thousands of manufacturers - and I think this broad approach to third-party implementation and cross-system integration will be a deciding factor for the tech's adoption in healthcare.

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