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Amazon Care will close after December 31. Launched in 2019, this virtual clinic offered several remote health services to employees working at the American group’s headquarters in Seattle and their families.
A twist in Seattle. Amazon has decided to close its Amazon Care virtual clinic. In an internal memo sent to employees, Neil Lindsay, head of group health initiatives, said Amazon Care was not “the right long-term solution for our corporate customers”thus confirming information disclosed by GeekWire. Therefore, the American giant will close the service after December 31.
Launched in 2019, Amazon Care offered several remote health services to employees working at the American group’s headquarters in Seattle and their families. The latter thus had the possibility of benefiting from medical consultations by videoconference, of having prescriptions issued, of reserving medicines at a pharmacy or even of making an appointment to be vaccinated at home. Since then, this virtual clinic had been deployed in all 50 American states, with home care possible in ten American cities, and had opened up to employees of other companies, such as Hilton, TrueBlue and Silicon Labs.
“We are not a bundle, we are people“
However, last week the washington post highlighted tensions between Amazon and medical personnel mobilized as part of Amazon Care. “We are not a bundle, we are people“, protested a nurse to the American newspaper which belongs to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.
However, this service represented the group’s first major breakthrough in healthcare. To strengthen its position in this sector, the company headed by Andy Jassy has made several acquisitions, such as the online pharmacy PillPack in 2018 for 753 million dollars, the American start-up Health Navigator, and more recently the subscription healthcare provider OneMedical, dubbed the “Netflix of healthcare,” for $3.9 billion.
Haven, ambitious health insurance project also abandoned
In this context, the abandonment of Amazon Care represents a major failure for the American group in its health expansion strategy. But this is not the first aborted project on this market that whets Amazon’s ogre appetite. At the start of 2021, the Seattle octopus had decided to end its health insurance project, carried out with JPMorgan Chase and Bershire Hathaway, the investment company of billionaire Warren Buffett. Ambitious on paper, this initiative came up against difficulties that dissuaded the three players from continuing on this path.
However, these projects, although aborted, act as experimental laboratories helping to advance Amazon in this area. Neil Lindsay said that Amazon Care helped the group gain a deep understanding of “what is needed over the long term to deliver meaningful healthcare solutions to businesses and individuals”.