A month after it announced plans to buy One Medical and citing issues with the program’s ability to connect with larger companies and more customers, Amazon announced shutting down its virtual and in-home healthcare service Amazon Care by the end of the year.
Amazon Care started in 2019 as a pilot program in an effort to serve Amazon’s own employees – initially just in Washington State – providing telehealth and on-demand services from a diverse team of clinicians.
According to an announcement in February, the program has since expanded with virtual visits offered nationwide and plans to have in-person services in 20 cities this year, and in April, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy listed Amazon Care as an iterative innovation.
In an email to Amazon Care employees on Wednesday, Amazon Health Services senior vice president Neil Lindsay said the decision to close the service was made after long and careful consideration.
Lindsay stressed that Amazon Care wasn’t going to work long-term since is not a complete enough offering for the large enterprise customers the company has been targeting although the enrolled members loved many aspects of the program.
However, it seems that on top of the competition from Aetna, Cigna, Humana, and Kaiser Permanente, which also have virtual services, the company faced, there was also internal strife at Amazon Care.
As per the Washington Post, some nurses have raised the alarm over Amazon Care’s inability to actually help patients due to the lack of adequate resources or physical locations to operate from, complaining about the company prioritizing the business over health care services.
Amazon has been trying for years to find its own ways to enter the healthcare industry, which provides a big opportunity for expansion, acquiring in 2020 the company PillPack, which was rebranded as Amazon Pharmaceuticals as well as One Medical, which operates 188 medical offices in 25 markets, in a $3.9 billion deal just last month.
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