American multinational Amazon is planning to venture in to India's fast-growing drug market. According to a report in The Economic Times, the company is considering investing in Apollo Pharmacy. The report said that Amazon is mulling a nearly USD 100 million investment in Apollo Pharmacy.
Notably, Amazon already delivers medicines in India and its expansion could give rise to competition in the market where Reliance Industries Ltd and Tata Group have already a sizeable presence. While Mukesh Ambani's Reliance recently bought a majority stake in online pharmacy Netmeds, reports suggest that Tata Group is in talks to pick up a majority stake in e-pharmacy firm 1mg.
Apollo Pharmacy is a part of Apollo Hospitals. Considered one of Asia's largest healthcare groups, it has over 3,000 plus outlets alone in India.
Meanwhile, Amazon's Amazon Web Services (AWS) has introduced Amazon HealthLake, a new service to enable healthcare organisations to store, transform, and analyse all of their data in the cloud. Amazon HealthLake aggregates an organisation's complete data across various silos and disparate formats into a centralised AWS data lake and automatically normalises this information using machine learning, the company said the AWS re:Invent conference on Tuesday.
The service makes it easier for customers to query, perform analytics, and run machine learning to derive meaningful value from the newly normalized data.
Organisations such as healthcare systems, pharmaceutical companies, clinical researchers, health insurers, and more can use Amazon HealthLake to help spot trends and anomalies in health data.
This can help them make much more precise predictions about the progression of a disease, the efficacy of clinical trials, the accuracy of insurance premiums, and many other applications, AWS said.
