Alexa is Coming to Hospitals and Senior Living Communities to Improve Care Experience and Help Fight Loneliness

Today, we are excited to announce two new solutions as part of Alexa Smart Properties that will enable senior living and healthcare providers to integrate Alexa into their properties and empower residents and patients to stay connected, informed and entertained, just by asking Alexa. These two solutions take another step toward our vision for Alexa and ambient technology to foster connection and help make our customers’ lives better — inside and outside of the home.

With Alexa Smart Properties in senior living communities, we aim to reduce loneliness for senior residents by enabling interactions with friends and family via Alexa, and enable a more connected environment that enables residents to communicate with staff, participate in property activities, and stay engaged with their community, by just asking Alexa. With Alexa Smart Properties in healthcare systems, we aim to improve the care experience for patients and care providers, enabling healthcare providers to communicate with patients quickly and easily with features like calling and Drop In—without the need to enter patient rooms. This enables hospitals to increase productivity, conserve medical supplies and protective equipment such as masks, gloves, and gowns, and frees up staff time to provide more personalized care. Healthcare properties can also enable HIPAA-eligible skills to connect care providers with residents and patients in an environment designed to protect their health information. Additionally, both solutions include the Alexa capabilities customers know and love, such as in-room smart device control, entertainment, and access to information. Solution providers will have access to Alexa Management APIs and Alexa Management Console, so they can grow their business quickly by automating set up and management of Alexa on a large number of devices, and offering a wider variety of features and devices to their customers. Our early adopters share their experience in this post.

Over the last several years, social interactions in the world have undergone a significant change, and the impact of COVID-19 has further underlined this impact. Senior living communities have been hit hard, and senior residents report finding it challenging to stay in touch with their loved ones. With Alexa Smart Properties, we enable permissions-managed, two-way audio and video calling, so that senior residents can connect with friends and family often. Moreover, friends and family can check in with senior residents through inbound calling. Senior residents can stay more connected with their community by asking Alexa for the menu of the day, by joining bingo night on video, or by connecting with other residents on an Alexa call.

The healthcare systems have been under a lot of stress lately. With Alexa Smart Properties, we enable care staff such as nurses and doctors to care for patients more efficiently. Customer testimonials from early adopters indicate that Alexa has helped hospitals streamline care process, save on costly personal protection equipment (PPE) and increase staff safety by reducing the number of in-person interactions required between care staff and patients, helping to curb infection risk.

Alexa Smart Properties senior living and healthcare solutions were designed with privacy in mind. No personal information is shared with Alexa to use the device, and voice recordings are not saved. Every Amazon Echo device offers multiple layers of privacy protection, and residents and patients can disable Alexa’s ability to hear and respond to the wake word at any time simply by pressing the mute button on top of their Echo device. Amazon implements administrative, technical, and physical safeguards for protected health information received as part of HIPAA-eligible skill interactions.

Todd Carling, Director of Business Development, Fellowship Square Mesa Community says “When we started using Alexa three years ago, our senior residents were hesitant about using technology. By adopting voice technology into our community, our residents have found more independence in their daily living. We also found that we are attracting younger residents, and the average age of our residents has decreased by two and one-half years. With baby boomers entering senior living communities, they are expecting to have technology in their lives. Communities will either flourish with technology or become stagnant without technology.”

Matt Smith, CEO of Speak2Software, says "What we do impacts people's lives. We create ways for people to connect, we deliver positive human emotions. We literally couldn't do that without our partnership with Alexa Smart Properties. They provide the tools and services for us to build our software on, but more importantly, they provide the guidance, support, and leadership we need to be successful and to bring those tears of joy to our customers."

Craig Anderson, Director of Innovation at Baycare, says, “One of the things we like about Alexa voice technology is that it lets our care team save steps while keeping them closer to our patients. The patient can simply ask Alexa for things they need like a blanket or a glass of water. Alexa interprets all those requests and sends it to right person. It is a seamless connection between the patient and their care team.”

Timothy Driscoll, Director of Technology Strategy at Boston Children’s Hospital, says, “Boston Children's Hospital is using Amazon Echo devices to provide an array of features to patients including entertainment in the form of music and games, hospital and unit-specific frequently-asked questions, and control of the in-room televisions. Our patients will soon be able to express their needs for things like pain management support - "Alexa, tell my nurse I'm in pain," or general comfort - "Alexa, tell my nurse I need a pillow." Using AI for the interpretation of patient intent will enable the direction of messages to the appropriate resource using real-time smart routing to existing hospital communication systems. Ultimately this will reduce the number of steps taken to understand and address patient needs.”

Visit https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/alexa/seniorliving and https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/alexa/healthcare to learn more. Contact us to onboard to Alexa Smart Properties. We can’t wait to see what you build.