Amazon It is shutting down its telehealth service, Amazon Care, marking a major setback for the retail giant in its efforts to break into the healthcare space.
Amazon will shut down service after December 31, Neil Lindsey, Amazon’s head of health services, announced Wednesday in a company email. The e-commerce giant decided to take the step after determining that it was not the “appropriate long-term solution for our enterprise customers,” Lindsey wrote in the memo, which was previously reported by Jake Wire.
“This decision was not taken lightly and only became clear after many months of careful consideration,” Lindsay said. “Although our registered members liked many aspects of Amazon Care, it is not a complete enough offering for the large enterprise customers we were targeting, and it won’t work in the long run.”
Despite the termination, Amazon gained a deeper understanding of “what is needed in the long run to deliver meaningful healthcare solutions to corporate and individual customers” with its launch of Amazon Care, Lindsay wrote in the memo.
Amazon Care launched in 2019 as a pilot program for employees in and around the company’s headquarters in Seattle. The service provides virtual urgent care visits, as well as free telehealth consultations and home visits for a fee from nurses for testing and vaccination.
The service was several years in the pipeline. In 2017, Amazon held a secret meeting in Seattle to learn more about patient care that was attended by VIPs in the healthcare industry, CNBC reported. He. She then rented Small group of doctors to start an experimental clinic for some employees.
In February, the company rolled Amazon Care offers nationwide default to its employees and other businesses, indicating that it has greater ambitions for the service.
It’s unclear how strong Amazon Care has been. Last June, Babak Parviz, a vice president at Amazon Care, He said Amazon has attracted many companies interested in using the service. Its corporate clients include Hilton, Silicon Laboratories, TrueBlue, and Whole Foods, the company’s owned upscale grocery store.
Amazon is shutting down even as CEO Andy Gacy is committed to carving out a path in the healthcare industry. Last month, Amazon acquired Boutique primary care provider One Medical for $3.9 billion. also sought to Development of medical diagnosis at home. And earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal Amazon mentioned is giving For home health service provider sign of health.
Here’s the full staff memo:
health services team,
We are working on an important missionary opportunity. Our vision is to make it easier for people to access the healthcare products and services they need to get and stay healthy. We know achieving this won’t be easy or quick, but we think it’s important.
One of the ways we have worked to achieve this vision over the past several years has been by offering our urgent and primary care service, Amazon Care. During that time, we have collected and listened to extensive feedback from our organization’s customers and their employees, and developed the service to continuously improve the customer experience. However, despite these efforts, we have determined that Amazon Care is not the appropriate long-term solution for our enterprise customers, and have decided that we will no longer offer Amazon Care after December 31, 2022.
This decision was not taken lightly and only became clear after several months of careful consideration. Although our registered members liked many aspects of Amazon Care, it’s not a complete enough offering for the large enterprise customers we were targeting, and it won’t work in the long run.
Our work building Amazon Care has deepened our understanding of what is needed in the long run to deliver meaningful healthcare solutions to both corporate and individual clients. You’ve heard me say this before, but I believe the healthcare space is ripe for reinvention, and our efforts to help improve the healthcare experience can have an enormous positive impact on our quality of life and health outcomes. However, none of these reasons makes this decision any easier for the teams that helped build Amazon Care, or for the customers our care team serves.
Our priority right now is to support you, no matter which path you take. Many Care employees will have the opportunity to join other parts of the health services organization or other teams at Amazon – which we will discuss with several of you shortly – and we will also support employees looking for jobs outside the company.
To the Amazon Care and Care Medical teams, thank you for your hard work over the past several years. You must be very proud of what this team has been able to achieve in such a short period of time. I am also grateful to our members and business clients for entrusting us with their care; This is not a responsibility to be taken lightly. As we take what we’ve learned from Amazon Care, we will continue to innovate and learn from our customers and industry partners, and hold ourselves to the highest standards as we further help reimagine the future of healthcare.
sincerely,
Nile
“Infuriatingly humble alcohol fanatic. Unapologetic beer practitioner. Analyst.”