Boston Children’s has also come up with an in-home application for voice-enabled health care, targeted to parents of young children. The hospital created an Alexa skill called KidsMD, which lets parents ask their speaker what to do when their children are sick. BCH has also developed a similar skill called Flu Doctor. John Brownstein, the hospital’s chief innovation officer, explains that the skills can save parents time and money.

“Oftentimes, [emergency rooms] are flooded with cases where an individual could be treated at home or they could wait the next day to go to a physician’s office,” Brownstein says. “These tools are helping triage people.” Keeping some patients out of the ER when they don’t need to be there could in turn keep diseases from spreading, Brownstein says.

Parents can ask KidsMD for help with cold and flu symptoms such as fever or stomachache. Brownstein explains that the skill follows a similar format to Thermia, a tool on the BCH website that allows parents to enter a kid’s age, weight, and symptoms to find advice on how to respond to a fever. “We just took that framework that we use at the hospital and put it into a chatbot,” he says.

Read: Alexa wants to know how you’re feeling today

But because consumer voice assistants are not HIPAA compliant, they can make only simple health recommendations. Health-care providers are exploring how voice assistants might become fully integrated in a medical environment, but these are early days. Each prospective use comes with prospective drawbacks. Doctors placing medical orders via speaker risk accidentally ordering the incorrect medicine or dosage if they’re misheard. Directly speaking with devices might be faster than reviewing paperwork, but could slow things down if Wi-Fi is spotty. And the risk of storing health records, lab tests, or medical bills on a private company’s non-HIPAA-compliant servers is huge.

“Privacy is one of our top concerns as we’re building tools,” Brownstein says. “We kept privacy in mind as we were building our KidsMD skills.”

Privacy foregrounds the conversation as providers explore voice-enabled health care and balance legal concerns with giving sound medical advice. This isn’t true for traditional online searches, where, as far as advertisers are concerned, seeking advice for dealing with cold and flu symptoms is the same as shopping for shoes. Online, everything is caught up in the same search-engine dragnet. Mucinex, for example, used Google’s browser data to target users with YouTube ads based on recent searches or a Google-determined “affinity” for healthy living.

Smart devices are becoming part of this trend as well. Amazon has filed a patent for a voice assistant that would recommend cold and flu medicine if it overhears you coughing. The health-care start-up Kinsa drew sharp criticism from privacy experts last year for selling illness data. Kinsa makes a smart thermometer that takes a user’s temperature, then instantly uploads it to a server along with gender and location information.