Amazon.com Inc. wants a slice of the emerging healthcare tech market and has a secret lab working on products in the space, according to a report published Wednesday.

CNBC claims that the e-commerce and cloud hosting giant is operating a “secret skunkworks lab” called 1492, likely named after the year Christopher Columbus discovered the new world. It’s dedicated to opportunities in health care, including new areas such as electronic medical records and telemedicine.

The lab is said to be working on projects including pushing and pulling data from legacy electronic medical record systems. Presumably such a service could tie into Amazon’s ever-growing Amazon Web Services business.

Other projects reportedly include a telemedicine platform that would facilitate virtual consultations and tap into stored medical data, and health applications for existing Amazon hardware such as the Echo and Dash Wand. The report added that it’s not clear whether Amazon is looking to build new dedicated health devices, but it’s not impossible it might do so in the future.

Amazon already provides services to healthcare providers through AWS cloud services, such as with Tristar Medical Group, though that was for general cloud access, not specifically targeted at the market. The company has previously shown an interest in healthcare services, having invested in Grail Inc., a Menlo Park, California-based company developing a blood test that can diagnose and detect cancer at its earliest stages.

It’s unlikely that at some point in the near future Echo users will be saying “Alexa, do these spots mean I have a fatal disease?” But the growing healthcare tech market offers ample growth opportunities for Amazon going forward.

The global healthcare Internet of Things market alone is predicted to grow to $400 billion by 2020, and if Amazon can capture even a small slice of that market, that’s another multibillion-dollar subsidiary in Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos’ (pictured) path to world domination.

Photo: oreilly/Flickr