It could be a company that started selling books from CEO Jeff Bezos’ garage in the early days of the dotcom boom, but Amazon has made diversification its trademark. Today it is a huge retail empire and also one of the largest providers of cloud services, it has a film studio and its own line of technology from tablets to fitness bands to smart speakers.
And its most recent expansion – into the healthcare market – could be the most momentous yet.
Earlier this year, Amazon made Amazon Care available to businesses in Washington state and plans to roll out the service in all 50 states by summer.
SEE: Guide to becoming a digital transformation champion (TechRepublic Premium)
Amazon Care is largely based on a telemedicine model: users make their first contact with a medical professional via video conference or chat via the Amazon Care app. Then, if users need to see a personal doctor or health professional, Amazon Care can arrange a doctor or nurse to visit the user’s home for exams or exams such as blood draws, as well as routine basic care such as vaccinations and flu, or COVID-19 Testing.
While the use of telemedicine has been increasing for years, the rollout of a primarily virtual health service is good at the right time given the ongoing pandemic: prior to COVID-19, approximately 11% of US consumers used telemedicine appointments, according to consultant McKinsey; that number has since risen to 46%.
Amazon Care’s own offerings are shaped by the challenges of the pandemic: As part of the package for this year’s market launch, Amazon Care is offering a service that allows users to check whether their home office setup has musculoskeletal and joint problems, and there are also a program for people with sleep problems.
While both joint and sleep problems are a common cause of GP visits, Amazon is likely focusing on these areas with an eye on the bottom line of employers: musculoskeletal disorders are one of the biggest health causes of employee absenteeism in the United States , while poor sleep is believed to cost employers billions in lost productivity each year.
And one of these employers is, of course, Amazon itself. Amazon Care was originally launched in 2019 in Washington State, where the company is headquartered, as a pilot project for Amazon’s own employees and their families. Medical expenses for employers in the United States are substantial, and Amazon Care would have given the company a way to manage its healthcare expenses and improve employee health outcomes while increasing productivity.
Amazon not only offers virtual care via Amazon Care, but also offers personal services through a partnership with Crossover Health. Amazon announced it will open 20 inpatient clinics with Crossover Health, where Amazon employees and their families can access services in population centers where many Amazon employees work from home.
While the crossover clinics are initially separate from Amazon Care, it is possible that they will also be made available to other employers.
“Amazon will be strategically looking at other cities or areas in which they could set up a clinic to support their employees, but I doubt that there is a critical mass of employees to give them a return on this investment, so they need others to get.” Employers who are also using the services or who are looking into the future as to how they can offer services directly to consumers, “Arielle Trzcinski, a lead analyst at Forrester’s health practice, told ZDNet.
That’s not to say that getting into healthcare is easy; Amazon closed its first healthcare project, a joint venture with JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway called Haven, just three years after it was founded. The trio will continue to collaborate informally, and Amazon plans to leverage its insights from the company elsewhere – presumably at Amazon Care, according to CNN Business.
But Amazon’s corporate culture and bloated coffers make it one of the few companies that could make such a radical change – from large retailer to health care provider – and either thrive or fail without showing any significant scars.
“If anyone can get into areas that are deeply rooted in healthcare, it’s probably someone like Amazon,” Sandeep Unni, senior direct at technology analyst Gartner, told ZDNet, adding, “I consider them a pretty unique company. that those big, bold bets that don’t all win. I think they have a structure that allows them to take these measured risks. And if they stumble, if it doesn’t work, they just fold and move on. “
Amazon Care was perhaps the company’s best-known introduction to healthcare, but it builds on a number of initiatives it has launched over the past few years.
In 2018, Amazon bought PillPack, a company that equates to Prime for medication, which delivers medication in the mail to people taking multiple medications in a day and refills their prescription when needed. This acquisition is being carried out as part of Amazon Care, with medicines being delivered to consumers’ homes. Healthcare was also the focus of hardware products: Alexa-operated devices such as the Echo and Dot already have some health-related skills, including breastfeeding advice and first aid. However, the most notable example of its hardware business towards health was the Amazon Halo, a fitness band with health-related features like sleep tracking, temperature measurement, and tracking of body fat composition.
Amazon’s strengths in hardware and its extensive computational and analytical resources through AWS could help Amazon Care address one of the biggest challenges in healthcare, not just for employers but worldwide: chronic illness. People live longer with long-term conditions like diabetes and heart disease, which require a lot of medical assistance, but good care makes a difference, extends people’s life expectancy, and improves their quality of life.
And it’s not hard to see how Amazon could at some point pull the dots together and tie these different initiatives together into one major health strategy.
“Over time, one could imagine these consumer devices connecting to Amazon Care: think, ‘Alexa, I want to schedule an appointment with Amazon Care,'” said Lynne Dunbrack, group vice president, public sector, IDC ZDNet. “Or the Halo Band could be used to aid chronic disease management by sending data from chronic disease patients for monitoring and sending alerts to Amazon Care healthcare providers to indicate when clinical intervention is required.”
The issuance of monitoring devices like medical sensors could also enable Amazon to track employee health over a long period of time and build a useful collection of data that could help the healthcare industry figure out which models of care are most effective for managing chronic conditions, Caution said Trzcinski from Forrester.
“As they get deeper into this area, there is a lot of data that suddenly becomes very important and could find its way into AWS, for example, and it could be used to train analytics models or as a commercial data set that will anonymize and privacy-protect AWS customers Wise provided, but that could be a really valuable commodity. “
As Amazon expands its presence in the healthcare sector, it is confronted not only with startups like HelloMD, Teladoc Heath, or Doctor on Demand, but also with other retail giants looking for a part of the healthcare market: an agreement to acquire telemedicine provider MeMD earlier this year Year.
“When I look at the US healthcare system as a patient, it’s a rather complex and confused system with many guarded officers and fairly high barriers to entry in some areas. But the virtual care segment could be one that doesn’t. “Have the same high barriers to entry, which is one of the reasons many of these underdogs want to explore the next era of expansion,” said Gartner’s Unni.
It may not come as a surprise that retail giants are trying to get into the healthcare space. Aside from being a huge market – healthcare accounts for about a fifth of all US spending – it is also largely resistant to economic ups and downs that can hit other industries. In addition, it is an area that is ripe for change. Thanks to companies like Amazon, consumers are used to doing everyday things – from banking to booking trips or using government services – quickly and easily online, but dealing with doctors can still take time and become an inconvenience .
Through services like Prime, Amazon has accustomed consumers to expecting things to be delivered within hours with just one click: it has increased our expectations of how businesses work and now we are finding that old-school business models are based on The phone to make a doctor’s appointment, to travel to the office, to wait for the doctor to be free – are getting more and more frustrating. Amazon Care wants to change this by providing 24/7 advice and healthcare professionals who come to users where they are, not the other way around.
source https://dailyhealthynews.ca/why-amazons-push-into-healthcare-could-be-its-most-important-project-yet/
No comments:
Post a Comment