Fits, starts and successes
The Amazon Care program follows a model Amazon has perfected — using its employees and the company itself to pilot projects and scrutinize their possibility for success before rolling them out to consumers and other companies.
The expansion of Amazon Care comes on the heels of shuttering another healthcare experiment — Haven, a partnership and joint venture between Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway that focused on how to lower the growing costs of healthcare for employers.
Haven faced challenges from the start with quick and significant turnover at the leadership level, including the loss of its chief operating officer in 2019 and CEO in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic, which upended routine care and kept Haven employees at home, didn’t help, according to CB Insights principal analyst Jeffrey Becker.
Plus, alongside its participation in Haven, Amazon started running competing healthcare pilots internally. In 2018, for example, Amazon acquired online pharmacy PillPack, which has since been rebranded as Amazon Pharmacy and is now part of Amazon Care.
Given COVID-19 and the growing interest in virtual care options, Amazon Care’s expansion comes as no surprise, Becker said.
“Amazon Care is entering a crowded and well-funded market,” Becker said. “The company will find itself competing with telehealth and patient engagement companies that have found an increasingly active market within the employer segment.”
Haven, Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon Care focused on Amazon’s own employees, but the company has signaled that it wasn’t shy about expanding beyond that, Becker said.
Other parts of the Amazon healthcare strategy are also in play. In 2018, Amazon launched Comprehend Medical, a natural language processing service that uses machine learning to pull health data out of medical text; in 2019, it launched Amazon Transcribe Medical, a medical speech-to-text service. In 2020, the company released Halo, a health and wellness band that provides body composition information, voice analysis and sleep and activity tracking.
Just recently, Amazon started previewing HealthLake, which will allow healthcare providers and health insurance companies to store and analyze vast amounts of disparate healthcare data.