Amazon‘s connected home devices could be key to the company’s new initiative aimed at lowering U.S. health care costs by improving preventative care, tech investor Roger McNamee said Tuesday.

“With Amazon you have a lot of technology that people have around the home that if properly applied can help them be well every day so that their needs for health care are discovered sooner when they’re cheaper,” McNamee told CNBC’s “Squawk Alley.”

“The really obvious thing to do is to keep people from getting sick in the first place,” he said.

Amazon announced a joint venture with Berkshire Hathaway and J.P. Morgan Chase Tuesday to cut health care costs for their U.S. employees. The three S&P 500 giants, which together employ more than 1.1 million workers, said the independent operation will focus first on technology solutions to simplify the health care system.

Amazon has become a top player in hardware and home devices in recent years, with its Alexa-enabled smart assistants, Fire tablets and Fire TV.

Its devices don’t yet offer much health-specific functionality yet, but with logistics and timelines for the new venture yet to be released, the company has time to fix that.

“I don’t know how long it takes to do this but this is a really credible group of people to do it,” McNamee said. “The fact that Amazon’s bringing the technology piece of this gives me real hope.”

–CNBC’s Jeff Cox and Angelica LaVito contributed to this report.

Source: Tech CNBC
Amazon's home devices could be a key to cheaper health care, tech investor Roger McNamee says