Healthcare vs. Amazon Business

Amazon maintains its development into the healthcare field with the original acquisition of healthcare startup, Health Navigator.

Health Navigator presents technology and assistance to digital health businesses, CNBC states. At Amazon, Health Navigator will join the Amazon Care Group, which works as a therapeutic advantage for workers. Amazon Care stores care mostly, and with homestays, if extra care is required, CNBC states.

The First Step

The organization is just a “modest initial step that will let Amazon start developing a medicine administering company,” Adam J. Fein, Ph.D., addresses in Drug Channels. “We are still a long, long way from a major restructuring of the complex U.S. drug flow. The authorities still have possibilities to support their position, gaining value from internet technologies, and streamline shipping.”

While Health Navigator is a comparatively little benefit, “if Health Navigator benefits with Amazon mechanics, it opens the door to extend it to Haven Healthcare likely—its investment with J.P. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway,” Ash Shehata, public sector leader for Healthcare & Life Sciences at KPMG, discusses Drug Topics.

Last summer, Amazon obtained PillPack, which gives medicines in pre-sorted dose packaging and orders refills and rehabilitation. At the time, the news shook drugstore stocks hard. CVS Health, Walgreens Boots Alliance, and Rite Aid collectively lost more than $11 billion in stock market value the day the news was published, tells Fein.

“Healthcare companies will often try service contributions to their employees before bringing them publicly to consumers. This allows seeing how services will fare with real patients and appointments with healthcare providers,” Shehata says. Nevertheless, KPMG is not sure whether Haven will present healthcare services to other employers or people outside of the three organizations in the venture.

Significant Changes

“Each company is well resourced, and Haven has the scale of a small health plan with a high degree of technological elegance at its conclusion. The question is how and where it wants to expand healthcare settings,” Shehata states.

Amazon might make much more meaningful improvements in the healthcare and pharmaceutical sector in the future. In addition to PillPack, Amazon might contemplate buying drugstore chains such as Rite Aid, Anthony Chukumba, an investigator for Loop Capital Markets, reports CNBC.

Amazon could also present healthcare service to clients at Whole Foods Market, or the grocery chain it is starting, Chukumba states.

“It is understandable for Whole Foods to devote floor space for drugstores or clinics, increasing PillPack/Amazon’s healthcare brands,” Shehata states. “Retailers are eager to make a push into healthcare, and healthcare organizations are looking to make themselves more patient-centered or even consumer-friendly.

Amazon would have to explain the most prolific users of the store space and what sort of contact a health clinic would have on the local adventure at its Whole Foods stores. With that in mind, there is a lot of thought that drugstores will be opened in Whole Food in the coming years.” 

All In All

“The big question remains about what Amazon aspires to do in healthcare,” Shehata says. “It’s piecing together businesses that can affect primary care, and it has the AI and analytic capabilities to engage patients and consumers. Amazon can make more investments in healthcare.”

Whether the company wants to make those investments currently remains uncertain.