Amazon has been ratcheting up its healthcare team bit by bit and now it has selected a health tech professional who once served as the chief health informatics officer with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention, according to a CNBC article, which cited a source with knowledge of the hire.
Taha Kass-Hout will serve in a business development role focusing on healthcare projects, according to CNBC, which noted that Kass-Hout will work with Amazon Grand Challenge chief Babak Parviz, a former director at Google X who joined Amazon in 2014 as a vice president.
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At the FDA, Kass-Hout’s role came into being with the creation of the Office of Informatics and Technology Innovation. The office’s first major initiative was the openFDA program. The initiative was designed to develop open-source APIs to provide researchers and entrepreneurs access to scalable, structured datasets, including adverse events, drug product labeling, and recall enforcement reports. One API was geared to help users to search for adverse event reports on medical devices dating back to 1992.
Amazon’s interest in healthcare has been the source of speculation given the company’s resources, customer base and supply chain management, as well as the prospect of what the online retail giant could do for healthcare. What form its healthcare ambitions will take has been fed by leaks about Amazon’s healthcare lab 1492, its potential to disrupt prescription drug distribution, plans to launch a healthcare joint venture to serve employees at Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase and new hires, such as a geriatrician.
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