Amazon announced late August its virtual care and in-home health service, Amazon Care, will shut down by year end. Art Cooksey, CEO of Let’s Talk Interactive, a Charlotte-based telehealth firm, says it’s a consequence of Amazon not having the functionality to support its enterprise customers.
Amazon Care launched in September 2019 initially as a health-care offering for Seattle, Washington-based Amazon employees. The virtual health service was then made available to the tech and retail giant’s employees nationwide. Amazon announced Feb. 8 its in-person services would expand to 20 new cities for care such as vaccinations, pharmacy delivery, house-call services and flu testing. Those services were already available in some cities such as Seattle, Baltimore, Dallas and Boston.
Last year, the service was also available to the staff of corporate customers such as Silicon Labs, Precor, Hilton, TrueBlue and Amazon-owned Whole Foods. Cooksey said Amazon’s end to its telehealth offerings is due to marketing to large health-care networks without having a sufficient enterprise system.
“Where Amazon really went wrong is taking on an employee assistance program model and marketing to companies to provide an EAP,” he said. “For their model to work, they needed an enterprise version of software to link into major health-care systems, which they didn't have. They're spending however many dollars they spent in marketing without the infrastructure to support it.”
Amazon Care workers were told the telehealth care was ending due to its corporate customer’s not seeing the service’s value, according to a report in The Washington Post. Neil Lindsay, Amazon’s senior vice president of health, sent an email to staff stating, “Although our enrolled members have loved many aspects of Amazon Care, it is not a complete enough offering for the large enterprise customers we have been targeting, and wasn’t going to work long-term,” The Post reported.
Cooksey said Amazon took on a mission to serve consumers by linking to enterprise health-care systems. However, he said, the Amazon Care product wasn’t finished. With One Medical, a health-care startup Amazon acquired for $3.9 billion in July, it would have been an “easy connection point” to tie in those targeted providers, he added.
The acquisition came after Amazon’s previous failed affordable-care effort. In 2018, Amazon collaborated with JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: Chase) and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. The trio formed Haven, an independent company to improve health-care costs that shut down last year.
“Amazon themselves are injecting a lot of cash into health care, and that's really good for our health-care systems,” Cooksey said. “I really hope and believe that Amazon Care getting out of the way is going to create more opportunities for other companies to go in that truly do have the expertise to get this done… I'm thrilled to see them move out of the way and free up some of this additional funding that’s out there.”
According to the Amazon Care website, in-person and primary care services will end on Sept. 30. Starting Oct. 1, the provider will only offer urgent care services by chat and video calls. All of the company’s operations will end Dec. 31.
Amazon Care ending its services it not an indicator telehealth isn’t a good offering, Cooksey noted.
“Telehealth is not going anywhere,” he said. “Sorry to see Amazon go but appreciate the visibility they brought to telehealth.”
