Amazon has launched app-based medical services for its employees in Seattle, as the technology company experiments with new ways to cut the costs and improve the experience of healthcare.
The new service — Amazon Care — combines an app for video calls and text chats with doctors or nurses with visits from “mobile care nurses” to employees’ homes and offices.
Amazon, which bought online pharmacy Pillpack last year, will also deliver prescriptions to patients. It is working with Oasis Medical, a Washington statebased medical service, to provide the clinicians.
Amazon Care is being launched after the company established Haven, a joint venture in healthcare with bank JPMorgan Chase and Warren Buffett’s investment firm Berkshire Hathaway, last year — spooking investors in various sectors of the healthcare industry, which fear disruption by the tech giant.
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Led by Atul Gawande, the surgeon and bestselling author, Haven aims to find new ways to lower high healthcare costs in the US, first for the three companies’ 1.2m employees and then for other potential customers.
Amazon Care is separate from Haven and Pillpack. An Amazon spokesperson said it was piloting the healthcare benefit for employees to help them get fast access to healthcare without an appointment. The launch was first reported by CNBC.
For Amazon, the model could be cloud provider Amazon Web Services, which started as an internal product and has become a huge growth driver.
