Page 33 - July 2018 Disruption Report

AMAZON EATS EVERYTHING JANJULAYRY20210818
Amazon is expanding its presence in healthcare sector
Amazon is focused improving the nation’s inefficient and cumbersome healthcare system through acquisitions, partnerships and utilization of its cloud integrating digital platforms to improve patient care. With health care costs rising, more employers self-insuring and workers facing higher insurance deductibles, Amazon is poised to create a consumer-driven health care initiative that will reduce costs and improve patient care in the today’s siloed industry.
In January, Amazon joined forces with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase to form an independent health care company for their 1.2 million employees. Atul Gawande, CEO of the Amazon-JPMorgan-Berkshire Health Initiative, said:
I have devoted my public health career to building scalable solutions for better healthcare delivery that are saving lives, reducing suffering, and eliminating wasteful spending both in the US and across the world. Now I have the backing of these remarkable organizations to pursue this mission with even greater impact for more than a million people, and in doing so incubate better models of care for all. This work will take time but must be done. The system is broken, and better is possible.
Reinventing medical care could produce hundreds of innovations. Some may be as simple as giving patients greater e-mail and online support from their clinicians, which would enable timelier advice and reduce the need for emergency-room visits. Others might involve smartphone apps for coaching the chronically ill in the management of their disease, new methods for getting advice from specialists, sophisticated systems for tracking outcomes and costs, and instant delivery to medical teams of up-to-date care protocols. Innovations could take a system that requires sixty-three clinicians for a knee replacement and knock the number down by half or more.
Amazon can also provide the Initiative a large testing ground for aggregated consumer demand from its five million sellers and 310 million active customers (of which approximately 33% are Prime members).
Over the last 12 months, Amazon has gradually expanded its footprint into the healthcare industry—ramping up its medical supplies delivery business, launching an exclusive line of over-the-counter drugs and inheriting licenses to ship prescriptions through its acquisition of PillPack with pharmacy licenses in all 50 states. Coincidentally, PillPack’s Pharmacy OS looks similar to the fulfilled by Amazon/AWs platform model, providing innovative service solutions that are customer centric. Amazon’s is expected to augment its pharma supply chain by building out retail pharmacies for same day delivery, beginning with its Whole Foods store locations and
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