Amazon is shutting down its telehealth service, Amazon Care, marking a major exit for the retail giant in its bid to enter the healthcare space.
Amazon will be shutting down the service after December 31, Neil Lindsay, head of Amazon Health Services, announced Wednesday in a company email. The e-commerce giant decided to make the move after determining it was not an “appropriate long-term solution for our enterprise customers,” Lindsay wrote in the memo, reportedly before GeekWire.
“This decision was not taken lightly and only became clear after months of careful consideration,” Lindsay said. “While our registered members love many aspects of Amazon Care, it’s not a complete enough service for the large enterprise customers we’re targeting and won’t work. lasting action.”
While the service is coming to an end, Amazon has deepened its understanding of “what is needed in the long-term to deliver meaningful healthcare solutions to business and individual customers” through the rollout Amazon Care, Lindsay wrote in the memo.
Amazon Care launched in 2019 as a pilot program for employees in and around the company’s Seattle headquarters. The service offers virtual urgent care visits, as well as free teleconsultations and in-home visits for a fee from nurses for testing and vaccinations.
Service has been several years in the making. In 2017, Amazon held a secret meeting in Seattle to learn more about patient care with the participation of heavyweights from the healthcare industry, CNBC reported. It then rent a small group of doctors to start a pilot clinic for some staff.
In February, the company roll out Amazon Care’s virtual services are nationwide for employees and other companies, showing that they have greater ambitions for the service.
It’s not clear how much Amazon Care has collected. Last June, Babak Parviz, vice president of Amazon Care, speak Amazon has attracted many companies interested in using the service. Its corporate clients include Hilton, Silicon Labs, TrueBlue, and Whole Foods, the company-owned high-end grocery store.
Amazon is shutting down the service even as CEO Andy Jassy has pledged to break into the healthcare industry. Last month, Amazon buying One Medical store primary care provider for $3.9 billion. It also found a way develop medical diagnosis at home. And earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal Amazon report bidding for home health providers Health signal.
Here’s the full memo to employees:
Health Services Team,
We are looking for an important mission opportunity. Our vision is to make it easier for people to access the health care products and services they need and stay healthy. We know it won’t be easy or quick to get this done, but we believe it’s important.
One of the ways we have worked towards this vision over the past few years is by providing our primary and urgent care, Amazon Care. During that time, we’ve collected and listened to extensive feedback from corporate customers and their employees, and developed our services to continuously improve the customer experience. However, despite these efforts, we have determined that Amazon Care is not an appropriate long-term solution for our business customers and have decided that we will no longer offer Amazon Care after this. December 31, 2022.
This decision was not made lightly and only became clear after months of careful deliberation. While our registered members love many aspects of Amazon Care, it’s not a complete enough service for the large enterprise customers we’re targeting and won’t work. Castle.
Our construction of Amazon Care has given us a deeper understanding of what is needed in the long term to deliver meaningful healthcare solutions to business and individual customers. You’ve heard me say it before, but I believe the wellness space is ripe for reinvention, and our efforts to help improve the healthcare experience can have an immeasurable impact. positively affect our quality of life and health outcomes. However, none of this 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, whichever path you take. Many Caregivers will have the opportunity to join other parts of the Health Services organization or other groups at Amazon – which we will be discussing with many of you soon – and we will also support employees who are looking for roles outside of the company.
To the Amazon Care and Care Medical team, thank you for all your hard work over the past few years. You should be very proud of what this team has been able to achieve in such a short amount of time. I also thank our members and corporate customers for entrusting their care to us; This is not a responsibility we take lightly. As we learn lessons from Amazon Care, we will continue to invent, learn from our customers and industry partners, and hold ourselves to the highest standards as we continue to help reimagine the future of our customers. health care industry.
Best regards,
Neil
