Amazon's Halo
Healthcare seems like the next frontier for Amazon - AWS, Alexa Voice Service, Amazon Care and now Halo!
Hey folks! Shipping today’s newsletter from London - today’s piece is focused on Amazon’s launch of Amazon Halo (Health app) and Halo band (wearable).
I’ve written two pieces covering Amazon’s foray into (Health) insurance - one from the lens of Big Tech activity and the other focusing on the Indian market; feel free to review these before diving into this piece!
What’s the news?
on 27.08, Amazon launched “Halo” in USA - its health app [1]. For $ 69.99, customers can purchase the Halo wearable device & get 6 months of Halo membership for free. Halo membership includes:
Sleep monitoring
Body fat calculation (via photo/video)
Mental wellbeing monitoring (via speech analysis; including relationship measurement!)
Activity tracking
Lab partners including Mayo Clinic, Headspace, American Heart Association etc
At the $3.99 per month price tag, Halo membership isn’t expensive; the $47.88 annual price tag is much lower than Amazon Prime’s $ 119 annual price tag.
The Apple factor
The Halo band has an effective cost of $ 46.05 (at today’s discounted price) or $ 76.05 at full price; this price is markedly lower than Apple Watch 5 (~ $399). Granted that the Apple Watch supports ECGs, this price delta is quite significant!
As I wrote previously, at WWDC ‘20, Apple expressed its desire to build the Operating System for Healthcare, Apple has launched two Healthcare related apps - its own Health app and the “Attain” app with Aetna.
I find it partly amusing that Vitality insurance customers can link their Halo band to their insurance and get *3 years* of Halo membership for FREE - so much for Apple being touted as the defacto wearable partner for Vitality insurance!
Let’s take a short breather before exploring how Halo fits into Amazon’s broader Healthcare ecosystem.
The big picture
Amazons prior infrastructure investments are now being rolled up into the Halo Health offering
Amazon Web Services - Certain AWS regions have been certified under FedRAMP (needed to sell to US Federal agencies) and come with HIPAA support i.e. AWS can be used to store & manage sensitive health information [2]. AWS Storage Gateway (hybrid cloud & on-premises) is also HIPAA complaint. [3]
Alexa Voice Services - whilst Alexa is often associated as Amazon’s consumer facing assistant, AVS is also widely used in the development community since it acts as a single API for voice control & voice-based user engagement (incl of speech analysis)
Reckongition - Amazon’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine is a close competitor to Google’s Tesseract library; this is another developer delight!
Whilst not confirmed as yet, it seems these 3 infrastructure elements are powering Halo’s initial feature set:
AWS - data storage (refer the Halo privacy documents)
Alexa Voice Services - analysis of speech for mental health & relationship strength
Reckognition - body fat calculation using photos & video
Edit note - Pratyush pointed out that the Amazon infrastructure components listed above are ‘commodities’ in that anyone can purchase them for a fee. Whilst this is true, I was keen to highlight how Amazon has ‘rolled up’ these infrastructure elements (a B2B offering) into a consumer offering - which fascinated me.
We’ve seen Halo partner with Vitality Insurance from the get-go, I believe there is ample scope for Halo to become the wellness + wearable provider for Haven (Amazon’s Insurance JV with Berkshire & JP Morgan) and Amazon Care (Amazon’s in-house employee benefits pilot).
When I look at Amazon’s offerings in Health, I wouldn’t be surprised if a Prime Health offering is around the corner:
For Healthy individuals, the combination of Vitality (wearable-linked health insurance provider) and Halo (wellness + wearable) provider would be perfect! - -
You get Vitality reward points for your active lifestyle & discounts.
You’d get Halo Award points too - presumably someone would need to build a reward point exchange!
You might also end up with “special price” (i.e. volume discount) for being a Prime member on the Vitality health insurance provided your wearable is Amazon’s Halo.
For “at risk” individuals, Amazon’s offering become very convincing:
Amazon’s acquisition of Pillpack provides a great tool for Prime members with chronic conditions to manage their medication.
Alexa is a great voice assistant - especially for individuals with limited mobility or other impairments.
Halo would act as a health monitor (sleep patterns, heart rate, mental health etc) which is especially useful for preventative care in senior citizens.
Depending on the individual’s age and PEDs (pre-existing conditions), Amazon might be able to partner with specialist insurance payers for different patient populations.
If you thought Amazon’s (future) consumer facing Health proposition might be cool, wait until you see their (future) employee benefits proposition...
In the USA, Amazon has two employee benefits focused ventures:
Haven Healthcare - a joint venture with JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway looking to solve the ballooning employee benefits cost (linked to Healthcare expenses). Haven is yet to launch a product but with the ability to tap into ~1.2M employees provides a sufficiently large “beta” user base to test Halo (band) as part of an insurance contract.
Amazon Care - Since September 2019, Amazon has been piloting Amazon Care as a benefit for Amazon employees in the Seattle area - teleconsultation, health insurance, prescription delivery & more.
I can’t tell you whether the “AWS for Healthcare” will emerge from Haven or from Amazon Care but I can tell you it will emerge!
Whilst this piece was very focused on highlight the AWS for Healthcare in USA, I do see something similar emerge in India - powered by the India Stack - National Health Stack (Health), OCEN (lending) and Amazon’s investment into Acko
That’s all from me this weekend! I look forward to your thoughts, comments or feedback. If anyone based in the USA gets their hands on the Halo band, I’d love to hear about your experience!