Patients at NYU Langone Health facilities will soon be able to check in for appointments using Amazon’s palm-scanning technology, the company announced Monday.
TakeAway Points:
- Amazon One, the company’s palm-scanning technology, will be used by NYU Langone Health patients to check in for appointments.
- NYU Langone will benefit from the service by having a quicker sign-in process, shorter wait times, and less administrative work.
- Microsoft said Saturday evening that service was restored following an outage that left tens of thousands of users unable to access their Outlook email accounts and other programs.
Palm-scanning Tech
The contactless service, called Amazon One, can identify patients “securely and quickly,” according to a release. NYU Langone said the technology will help it speed up sign-ins, alleviate administrative strain on staff, and reduce errors and wait times.
For a health system that handles more than 10 million patient visits each year, every minute counts. With Amazon One, NYU Langone anticipates it will be able to cut the time patients spend at their front desks from about two to three minutes to less than a minute, Andrew Rubin, NYU Langone senior vice president of clinical affairs, told CNBC.
“That’s both a positive experience for the patient to be able to actually get in faster, and requires less work on our part having to authenticate who the patient is,” Rubin said.
Amazon will not store or access any of patients’ health data or personal information beyond their palm prints, NYU Langone said. Participation is voluntary, and patients can opt out at any time.
NYU Langone operates six hospitals and more than 320 outpatient facilities, and it’s the first health-care organization to ever deploy Amazon One. The collaboration has been about nine months in the making, said Nader Mherabi, NYU Langone’s chief digital and information officer.
Amazon said it plans to explore additional applications for Amazon One within health care in the future, such as credentialing for access to high-security areas and shared computer systems.
The company introduced Amazon One at its Go cashierless stores in 2020, and it rolled out to all Whole Foods Market locations in 2023. NYU Langone will be the largest third-party deployment of Amazon One to date.
The service will be available at NYU Langone sites in the New York metro area starting next week, and it will expand to other locations this year.
Amazon and NYU Langone did not disclose terms of the deal.
Microsoft resolves global outage
Microsoft announced on Saturday night that service had been restored after tens of thousands of users lost access to their Outlook email accounts and other applications due to an outage.
“We’re investigating an issue in which users may be unable to access Outlook features and services,” Microsoft 365 Status, the official Microsoft account for 365 service incidents, said in a post on X.
Services such as Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure were reported down as of about 3:30 p.m. ET. More than 37,000 individuals reported an Outlook outage and roughly 24,000 reported an outage in the tech company’s 365 service, according to Downdetector, while roughly 150 users reported their Teams accounts were down.
The outages were most highly concentrated in the New York, Chicago and Los Angeles areas, per the Downdetector reports.
Users also flooded social media site X complaining about their inability to access their Outlook emails, prompting concerns of a global Microsoft outage.
Microsoft reported on its service health update page that the company said, “Everything is up and running.”
In a Microsoft 365 Status update posted on X, the company said “it confirmed that service was restored.”
