Amazon Has Signed Multiple Companies to Its Telehealth Service
June 09 2021 - 1:00PM
Dow Jones News
By Sebastian Herrera
Amazon.com Inc. has signed multiple companies to its Amazon Care
telehealth service and will need thousands of employees to scale
the service, company executive Babak Parviz said Wednesday.
The tech giant has used Amazon Care for employees in Seattle
since 2019 and it is highly rated by employees, Mr. Parviz, an
Amazon vice president and former Google executive who is involved
in running the program, said at the WSJ Tech Health event.
The service begins with a chatbot, then allows for a virtual
visit with a health professional. If needed, a mobile medic will
visit a user within 60 minutes; the medic is capable of conducting
routine tests such as for strep throat, giving vaccinations or even
taking blood samples. Prescriptions can be delivered to the
person's address within two hours, Mr. Parviz said.
"It's quite different from anything we've had in the past," Mr.
Parviz said.
Amazon is expanding the digital component of the service to all
50 states this summer, and plans to bring the full service to the
Baltimore and Washington, D.C., area soon. The company wants to
expand to the full service over time, he said. Reaching that scale
will require thousands of employees, he said.
The service is offered as an add-on service to employer
healthcare plans, and Amazon plans to announce new companies that
have signed up later in the summer, he said.
Amazon's healthcare ambitions have expanded in recent years as
it has explored different ventures for employees and in the
pharmacy business. The company also pursued a number of
coronavirus-related initiatives to test employees and adjust its
business in response to the pandemic.
The retailer in March said it had started to offer Amazon Care
to employees and other companies throughout Washington state and
planned to make the program available throughout the U.S. this
summer .
Mr. Parviz said Amazon Care is particularly suited for a
post-pandemic world, where companies will have more remote
workforces.
Amazon has invested billions to respond to the pandemic. It
opened testing sites at its warehouses to screen employees for
Covid-19, and in March, it began to host on-site vaccination events
administered by licensed healthcare providers. The company in
November also rolled out an online pharmacy service that ships
insulin, asthma inhalers and other common generic branded
medications.
The success of Amazon's expansions into healthcare are still to
be determined. Remote-care industry executives have said the
company could get buy-in for its telehealth program from other
corporations that already use Amazon Web Services. Amazon hasn't
revealed what it is charging businesses for the service, but it
could gain traction based on low costs and if companies believe
remote care can significantly reduce workforce healthcare costs,
industry executives have said.
Already, the company has seen the perils of a highly-regulated
and geographically complex industry. Amazon, together with JPMorgan
Chase & Co. and Berkshire Hathaway Inc., saw their healthcare
venture, Haven, close down this year after the partnership
struggled to aggregate and analyze information on healthcare costs,
because of data concerns on the part of partners and insurers.
While in the partnership, Amazon had simultaneously worked to build
the Care telehealth service that it is now taking nationwide.
"We have to approach this with a sense of humility. We know that
there is a lot we don't know," Mr. Parviz said. "But also with a
sense of optimism. We do intend to do something good."
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 09, 2021 12:51 ET (16:51 GMT)
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