Amazon Care has been replaced by One Medical

In 2019, Amazon launched a primary care health service for its employees called Amazon Care. The service consisted of a telehealth component via the Amazon Care app (Figure 1), along with in-person visits by medical staff (doctor or nurse) to the patients’ home for routine care (e.g. blood draw or physical exam). As an additional feature, Amazon leveraged its online pharmacy to deliver prescription medicines directly to the home.

As a large corporation, Amazon offers a variety of health insurance plans from those it runs itself to those provided by large health insurance companies such as Cigna. The in-house plans mainly rely on existing provider networks from large managed healthcare companies, but could be supplemented by Amazon Care for certain primary care services.

Amazon Care was initially offered in Seattle (location of Amazon's headquarters) but eventually expanded nationwide to employees in all 50 states. They also were planning to build clinics in 20 cities that could provide more dedicated and involved care from onsite healthcare facilities. But all of this momentum came to an abrupt halt toward the end of 2022.

Last July, Amazon suddenly announced that they were going to acquire primary care company One Medical for $3.9 billion. What is One Medical (Stat)?

"One Medical, which went public in January 2020, offers telehealth visits and also provides in-person care in more than a dozen locations across the country. An early purveyor of tech-enhanced health care, the company boasts online booking for appointments and text-messaging with doctors, as well as a homegrown health record software that it says is more convenient for clinicians and patients."

In a nutshell, One Medical offered many of the same services (e.g. telehealth) that Amazon Care already possessed, as well as those that they were proposing to build out (i.e. clinics). This is what you call redundancy. A month later, the other shoe dropped when Amazon announced that they were shutting down Amazon Care issuing the following statement:

"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," 

In other words, Amazon's attempts to create their own primary care service was probably progressing too slowly, and so Amazon bought out an external operation that was further along.

Amazon's ambitions in the healthcare sector are large, and their journey is still in its infancy. As one analyst points out, in the future they are likely to expand their beachhead in primary care to more complicated and expensive chronic care (link):

“The end of Amazon Care did seem abrupt. But as Amazon moves from primary care, into more complicated care, and potentially even chronic care – and combines pharmacy and over-the-counter medication with all its offerings – everyone from private health start-ups to Teladoc to retail competitors and health-care incumbents should continue to worry.”

The ultimate objective may be to become a full-service healthcare provider like a Cigna or UnitedHealth Group. Then there is even the possibility that Amazon grows out its internal health insurance for employees to those outside of the company. It could then combine healthcare insurance, a medical provider network, and online pharmacy to become a healthcare conglomerate like UnitedHealth or Cigna. If they are successful then they could indeed become the biggest company in the world.

Figure 1. Amazon Care has been shut down (https://amazon.care/), and will likely be replaced by the primary care services of One Medical.