Are you ready to buy your healthcare services from the same place you can buy almost everything else under the sun? Amazon hopes you are.
Last month, the giant of online sales announced plans to acquire One Medical, a company that operates more than 125 medical offices across the U.S. and offers 24/7 telemedicine service in exchange for a yearly membership fee. One Medical’s vision is to “delight millions of members with better health and better care while reducing the total cost of care,” according to a news release about the acquisition.
Amazon thinks healthcare needs to be reinvented.
“Booking an appointment, waiting weeks or even months to be seen, taking time off work, driving to a clinic, finding a parking spot, waiting in the waiting room then the exam room for what is too often a rushed few minutes with a doctor, then making another trip to a pharmacy — we see lots of opportunity to both improve the quality of the experience and give people back valuable time in their days,” says Neil Lindsay, senior vice president of Amazon Health Services.
The One Medical venture appears to be an expansion of Amazon Care, which was launched in September 2019, primarily for app-based doctor appointments and a limited number of in-person services. The company hoped to have Amazon Care available in more than 20 U.S. cities by the end of this year.
Not Amazon’s first healthcare effort
In January 2018, Amazon joined JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway to launch a program called Haven that aimed to make healthcare easier to obtain, prescription drugs more affordable, and insurance benefits easier to understand. Amazon tried out the idea on its own employees for a few years, but the experiment was unsuccessful and it was dumped last year. But Amazon began offering something else in the healthcare field called Amazon Pharmacy, which provides discount medications on its website.
Amazon isn’t the only player
CVS is reportedly looking into expanding the healthcare services it provides as well. MinuteClinics have provided basic healthcare services inside CVS pharmacies for a number of years. Now, according to The Wall Street Journal, the pharmacy chain may soon make a bid to buy Signify Health, a company that provides technology services for the home healthcare industry.
Would you use Dr. Amazon?
Have you ever used a MinuteClinic? Would you? Would you be likely to use Amazon Care? Does the fact that you live with multiple sclerosis weigh into that decision?
(A version of this post first appeared as my column on the MS News Today website.)
