After picking the first pharmacy to launch an effort to let patients manage their medications with Alexa, Amazon has followed up with the launch of a medical transcription service.

Modern Healthcare reports that after last week's announcement that supermarket and pharmacy chain Giant Eagle is the commerce goliath's choice for initiation of the medication management system via Alexa. The collaboration between Amazon and medication-management company Omnicell is one more step forward in Amazon's push into health care.

Giant Eagle customers can now review current prescriptions, set reminders to take medications and request prescription refills through the new Alexa application, after Amazon attributed its development to customer feedback.

Rachel Jiang, head of the Alexa health and wellness team at Amazon, wrote in a blog post, "We noticed a trend: many customers were using Alexa to remind them to take medications on a regular basis. We believe this new Alexa feature will help simplify the way people manage their medication by removing the need to continuously think about what medications they've taken that day or what they need to take."

The new feature is expected to be particularly helpful to those who take multiple medications daily, and to seniors still living at home and juggling their own health care needs.

This week's news of the launch of Transcribe Medical, is aimed at making clinical documentation more efficient. This feature is a collaboration with Cerner Corp., which "is using Transcribe Medical to develop a digital voice scribe that can 'listen' in the background during a patient's visit and transcribe physician-patient conversations into text," according to Modern Healthcare.

Cerner's end goal is the creation of a tool that will function in the background to document notes automatically into its electronic health record system. Jacob Geers, a solutions strategist at Cerner, says that the project is in the "initial development" stage.

Since protected health information covered by HIPAA is part of the data that will be transcribed, the report says that Transcribe Medical customers will have to sign a business associate agreement with Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud computing arm. Those agreements will, according to Amazon, require customers to encrypt all protected health information when using AWS services.

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Amazon digs deeper into health care with Alexa, medical transcription

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