Amazon unveils another double play from its one oasis of ecommerce operation. As America’s second largest employer, Amazon has the numbers to run any playbook it wants. This week, we are learning that Amazon is expanding its telehealth services to all employees in the United States, after a successful pilot in Seattle.
Amazon Care, the e-commerce giant’s telehealth service, will be expanded to all Amazon employees in the U.S. this summer, with plans to roll out service to other employers later this year. Amazon Care started as an app-based pilot program for Seattle-area employees last year. The expansion signals Amazon wants a bigger share of the employer market as virtual health care booms during the pandemic. CNBC notes that Amazon Care, its pharmacy and its employee clinics are all run independently, but the company “won’t speculate about how this will evolve.”
What Amazon is doing makes sense. Yes, why send that money to other practitioners when you can hire few doctors in one location, equip their offices with telehealth solutions, and ask employees to install the app. If you build, staff may not need to take a day off to see a doctor since there is a doctor at work! You get the idea? So, each warehouse or office within the Jeff Bezos empire will have a Telehealth room where staff can book an appointment to meet a doctor. No traffic, no distraction – go in and come out, and get back to work. The empire continues to expand.
Winning the 21st century market will require discovering how to capture value because unlike in the past, core competency, while necessary, is diminished once you have the foundational technology stacks in-house. If that core stack is running, you can add other stacks on top.
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Today, Amazon has added telehealth services along with its clinics and pharmacy, and within years, it will open it to all Americans. Then, you will see Amazon Care local partners where local clinics enroll to become physical feeders for Amazon. In other words, when it becomes necessary to see a physical doctor, Amazon Care refers you to the local clinics. But most things will possibly begin at Amazon.
No matter how you see it, American cities may not need many clinics as Amazon Care will process most works online. People, I will discuss this deeper during Tekedia Live tomorrow.
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By the time Amazon Care is opened to the public, it will look like what Intuit did to accounting firms, this time clinics will beg to be swallowed within the Amazon Forest…
When you have the numbers and capabilities, not many things need to be outsourced, you simply create a unit, hire few talents, and you keep the money in house.
This is a model the big universities we have here should be running, but rather we have creatures who prefer going on strikes to using their heads to create the sort of future they actually want; paralysed minds everywhere.
In few years, they will learn how to run a modern university…