Amazon plans to deliver health care to your door
With COVID changing our buying habits and consumers looking for safety as well as convenience, most of us have ordered multiple items from Amazon over the past two years. You can literally find anything on Amazon, but did you know that soon you will be able to “see” a nurse, a doctor, or get a diagnosis using telehealth within minutes, from the comfort of your home?
Amazon wants to be the future of health care in the United States. They have promised to deliver virtual care in all 50 states and have set their sights on all aspects of health care. They have the money, tech know-how and ability to succeed.
COVID has taught us that telehealth and home-based care is safer, convenient and sometimes more patient/customer oriented than in person visits. Amazon has succeeded in the retail business world by building a seamless one stop, user-friendly customer experience, and they hope to duplicate this in the health care world.
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Amazon Care Director Dr. Kristen Lloyd Helton confirmed plans to bring Amazon Care to Dallas, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and Los Angeles with the hopes of being in 20 major cities by sometime in 2022. They started by offering virtual care services for employees (now numbering 1.3 million), with the plan to expand to other businesses as well as the general public.
And why not? With the scramble for employees these days, offering these kinds of benefits is an investment in retaining workers. “We want to make sure the services we provide are improving health, but also eventually lowering costs,” Helton told MedCity News.
Amazon is already partnering nationally with PillPack, an online pharmacy that Amazon acquired in 2018, and Health Navigator, a start-up they acquired to provide services to digital health companies, just to name a few acquisitions. Alexa became HIPPA compliant so it can easily transmit and receive protected health information.
They are even developing AI models for surgery which “has the potential to reduce cost and complications of certain surgeries by 40 to 50%.” Their cloud-based service, AWS (Amazon Web Services), is “well positioned to become the preferred cloud technology partner for healthcare companies,” according to The Motley Fool. The master plan is to advance clinical software and data management for physicians and hospitals, precision medicine, cancer research and more.
No one can disagree that our current medical delivery system is broken and not user friendly. Exacerbated by both COVID, severe staff shortages, vaccination wars and deaths, the health care industry is reeling.
I routinely hear from my consulting clients that they can’t find a doctor who is accepting new patients, and when they do, it is a 3-5 month wait to get an appointment. Have a problem? Go to the “ER.” Whereas the average wait time for a call into Amazon Care? Sixty seconds! For employees, this service is available 24/7, 365 days a year. Imagine being able to text questions to your doctor and have a same-day zoom appointment.
Connect with a triage team who will route you to a nurse, nurse practitioner, or a doctor. Google “Amazon Care” and watch their sleek video. Very impressive if they can deliver, including eventual in-home visits from an Amazon doctor to your door. “Think of this as Amazon Prime same-day-delivery on steroids … What’s not to like?” said Paddy Padmanabhan from the Healthcare IT News website.
In March 2021 Amazon launched “Moving Health Home” in partnership with seven large national companies focused on providing care in the home. Together, these organizations want to "fundamentally change the way policymakers think about the home as a site of clinical service," says the founding companies. The groups want to change the reimbursement models used by Medicare and Medicaid and expand services for home care and the newer initiative, “hospital without walls.”
With Amazon's 310 million active users (including 100 million Amazon Prime members) and 5 million sellers, they have access to a built-in customer base, hoping for better access to a positive health care experience. The U.S health care market, now valued at $3 trillion, (the most expensive in the world), needs a new approach.
Maybe it will take a Goliath like Amazon to break the strangle hold of Big Pharma, Big Healthcare, and all the other lobbyists and politicians standing in the way of lower costs and better care. We can all agree that there is room for competition and innovation.
Who would have thought Amazon might deliver the breakthrough we need? Only time will tell.
Star Bradbury (www.starbradbury.com) is the owner of Senior Living Strategies in Gainesville.
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This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: Star Bradbury: Amazon seeks to shake up health care industry
