Emergency Bot Amazon’s ruthless efficiency is taking hold in the healthcare industry. In 2022, it acquired the primary care service One Medical for $3 billion. Since then, The Washington Post reports, patients and employees have complained about shorter appointments, fewer staff, and increasingly sparse services. In keeping with the times, Amazon is also pivoting One Medical’s services to a more telehealth-based model, taking on more new customers than its limited physical locations can provide. It may have a high-tech solution for that. According to WaPo, Amazon is training an AI chatbot to triage patient messages, potentially meaning that whether or not someone gets immediate care for an urgent medical inquiry will come down to the questionable decision-making of a large language model. Amazon declined to confirm these AI plans to the paper, but if true it joins a worrying trend of the tech being used in medical scenarios despite its dubious reliability. Patients Please One of the healthcare providers heavily affected by the Amazon takeover is Iora, a subsidiary of One Medical. Rebranded to One Medical Seniors, it was quickly hit with huge staff cuts after the acquisition. Between it and Amazon Pharmacy, the two companies lost hundreds of employees. Before Iora rebranded under Amazon’s takeover, patient Deborah Wood said that its doctors responded to her calling about worrying heart symptoms in the middle of the night by calling her back “every 30 minutes to make sure I was okay.” Now, she sometimes doesn’t get phone calls back for days….Amazon-Owned Health Clinics Reportedly Training AI Chatbot to Triage Patients