Amazon has long had high ambitions for disrupting the health-care sector, as all big companies —outside the health industry — probably should.
The cost that companies, and the economy, pay into the bloated U.S. health system is, as Warren Buffett once said, like a "tapeworm" on the economy. In fact, Buffett, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos not too long ago planned to take down that tapeworm with Haven, but as Buffett said after the dissolution of that effort, "the tapeworm won."
Amazon hasn't given up on health aims. The ecommerce giant closed its deal to buy primary health-care provider One Medical for $3.9 billion in February, with CEO Andy Jassy stating, "We believe we can make the health care experience easier, faster, more personal, and more convenient for everyone."
That hasn't come without some setbacks – Amazon Care, its effort to take on telemedicine and primary care for the employer market nationwide, was shut down in August after just three years.
An earlier deal informs one of Amazon's latest efforts. In 2018, it bought online pharmacy PillPack for $750 million, which it followed up by launching its own virtual clinic for chronic conditions. Now Amazon Clinic, which launched in November, is looking to open up a new option for virtual care to help with common issues like allergies, acne and hair loss.
"At the end of the day, all patients, all customers, all people want to be healthy," Nworah Ayogu, the chief medical officer and general manager of Amazon Clinic, told CNBC's Bertha Coombs at the CNBC Healthy Returns virtual event last month. "The reason why they're not healthy is because the health system has all these barriers, so whether that is cost, confusion … some are societal, some within the health-care system, so that's really on us to remove those barriers and think through how we do that."
Ayogu, who previously was the founding medical director for Cityblock Health — which was created to help low-income and elderly Americans access health-care, primarily those who qualify for Medicaid — and is a member of the White House Health Equity round table, echoed Jassy's view.
"We're only three years into this journey writ large, but when we think about what we're trying to do, it's really about making it dramatically easier for customers to find, to choose and to afford the products and services they need to get and stay healthy," he said.
Ayogu shared several more thoughts on what he sees ahead for Amazon in this ever-changing health-care space.
A fraction of Amazon's customers is enough to get started.
Ayogu noted that Amazon has hundreds of millions of people using its products and services each day, and that's a good place to begin to disrupt the health-care status quo.
"To me, it was really about thinking through if we can have just a fraction of those people, if we can impact them, that's such a massive scale to do good, so it's really being able to zoom in and think through how we can use those resources and point those toward health."
The Amazon 'marketplace' idea is a good fit for the clinic concept.
Amazon has a lot of competition in the primary care and clinic space, some from health retailers aggressively chasing similar opportunities. CVS is one example, with over 1,100 MinuteClinic sites and its recent acquisitions of primary care providers Signify Health and Oak Street Health.
Ayogu pushed back against the idea that Amazon can't stand out in a crowded field.
What Amazon does well on its retail site, he said, is connecting buyers and sellers to the products they need: a marketplace. That translates well to virtual care.
"I think we're doing the same thing with Amazon Clinic becoming more of that as a marketplace where you can find your providers and producer groups for your issue," Ayogu said. "So right now, that focuses on connecting people rapidly to common conditions."
Why a customer-centric company can succeed in health.
Health care, he said, can at times be correctly described as paternalistic. "Care can be a thing that we do to patients rather than with patients or for patients," Ayogu said.
That's not the way Amazon approaches the relationship.
"Amazon says customer, that's the person you're serving, that's the person who's making the decisions, and it's a different phrase, right? It kind of shifts the power dynamic where the customer is the one who is deciding what happens, they are directing things, and the rest of us are going to serve the customer."
"It's a frame that I like because it puts us in kind of a servant mentality and mindset," Ayogu said.
Where the Whole Foods owner sees a food link to better health.
Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods and its Amazon Fresh grocery business don't fit into the health-care equation specifically, and Ayogu was quick to point out that the company will not be tracking shoppers' ice cream purchases for signals of poor preventative health management — health care privacy laws are strictly followed. But food is something that the retailer is thinking about in a health-care context.
"Food and nutrition is probably the other pillar of what we want to do with health-care services. We know that care and medication are two important pillars but there's more – there's food, there's nutrition, there's products," he said. "We have some unique assets to bring to bear to also connect patients to those things that they need for their care as well."
