Medical data, despite seeming like a juicy target, isn't really all that valuable atm. It requires a lot of infrastructure to move it around, and you can't do all that much with it without breaking the law. HIPAA/PHI fines can rack up really quickly and are still enforced relatively strictly. Although maybe Amazon's lobbyists are working on "fixing" that.
My guess is Amazon sees hospitals/practices starting to use more "cloud-y" services and wants to set themselves up to capture as much of that revenue as possible. The old hospital IT-fortress model leaves a lot of efficiency gains on the table and I'm sure AWS would love to be able to capture all of that.
source: I work at a "cloud-y" medical tech company
> Not everyone who who handles medical data is bound by it
This is true, but not true of anyone working at One Medical, since health care providers are bound by HIPAA. If you tell your friend you have cancer, sure, they can legally share that info. If you tell your faith healer, or your employer, they can as well.
If you tell your PCP (or your PCPs app, or their secretary), and they share that with Andy Jassy without him being cleared to handle PHI, they're in for a mountain of fines.
As much as I like being cynical about surveillance capitalism, I don't think Amazon's primary motivation here is patient data, at least in the short-to-medium term. If they wanted the data, they'd buy, like, a vitamin company or something.
> If they wanted the data, they'd buy, like, a vitamin company or something.
This is a very good point.
Nonetheless, I think that being cynical about anything Amazon is up to isn't unwarranted.
My primary personal problem with this deal is that I do my best to avoid doing business with Amazon at all, and the more tendrils they spread, the more difficult this will be.
My guess is Amazon sees hospitals/practices starting to use more "cloud-y" services and wants to set themselves up to capture as much of that revenue as possible. The old hospital IT-fortress model leaves a lot of efficiency gains on the table and I'm sure AWS would love to be able to capture all of that.
source: I work at a "cloud-y" medical tech company