Amazon announces new Alexa Smart Properties for Healthcare features at HIMSS 2023

At HIMSS23, Amazon announced a new suite of Alexa Smart Properties (ASP) for Healthcare capabilities designed to improve the patient and medical staff experience at hospitals. Today, ASP provides device fleet management of Alexa-enabled devices for premier healthcare facilities like BayCare Health System, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Hawaii Pacific Health to alleviate the burden of administrative tasks on medical staff so they can focus on more important patient care duties, as well as help keep patients informed, connected, comfortable, and entertained. 

With the new capabilities included in today’s announcement, healthcare and solution providers have even more ways to enable device fleet management and build Alexa capabilities at scale for patient care:

• WebRTC Support: The upcoming availability of WebRTC support will help patients and medical staff conduct audio and video calls between Echo devices and non-Echo devices like tablets and laptops. Being able to seamlessly connect medical staff and patients through virtual check-ins is an ASP feature that healthcare providers have loved using - it saves the time and PPE resources often needed for in-patient check-ins and also makes care teams more easily accessible to patients. With WebRTC support, we’re offering even more ways for medical staff and patients to have seamless peer-to-peer communication. 
  
  
• Private Branch Exchange (PBX) Support: Healthcare providers can link ASP-supported devices with their hospitals’ phone systems for routing Alexa calls and supporting caller ID when patients and medical staff conduct inbound and outbound calls. This ultimately helps medical staff know which patient is calling them so they can service them quicker. Additionally, patients know which loved one or care provider is contacting them, even when they’re immobile. Hospitals can maintain their existing configuration and routing rules, and augment their implementation with Alexa.
  
  
• WPA2 Enterprise Wi-Fi: The upcoming ability for providers to onboard ASP-supported devices to WPA2 Enterprise Wi-Fi networks so that healthcare providers can safely and securely connect these devices to Wi-Fi more seamlessly. With this new feature, properties can quickly onboard devices to their existing WPA2 Enterprise Wi-Fi networks without having to create another public network. 

In addition to these capabilities, Amazon announced the upcoming availability of our latest Echo Show device, Echo Show 15, for healthcare deployments. Echo Show 15 is an entirely new type of Echo Show—it can hang naturally on the wall and features a large screen for ideal accessibility and digital signage. Its plastic and glass case materials can also be sanitized more effectively for hospital settings.

"We’re thrilled to offer new tools to healthcare providers to leverage ambient intelligence to improve the patient and employee experience," said Bram Duchovnay, director of Alexa Smart Properties. “We look forward to continuing to help developers and healthcare organizations scale Alexa-enabled solutions for their patients and medical staff.”

See here to learn more about how Alexa Smart Properties for Healthcare offerings can help you deploy modernized technology solutions at scale for your hospital facility.