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Amazon is shutting down its telehealth service, Amazon Care, marking a major retreat by the retail giant in its efforts to break into the health care space.
Amazon will shut down the service after Dec. 31, Amazon Health Services chief Neil Lindsay said in a company email Wednesday. The company decided to end Amazon Care after determining it was not “the right long-term solution for our business customers,” Lindsay wrote in a previously reported memo GeekWire.
“This decision was not made lightly and only became clear after many months of careful consideration,” Lindsay said. “While our members loved many aspects of Amazon Care, it’s not a complete enough offering for the large business customers we’ve targeted, and it won’t work long-term.”
Although the service is ending, with the launch of Amazon Care, Amazon has gained a deeper understanding of “what is needed in the long term to provide meaningful healthcare solutions for businesses and individual customers,” Lindsay wrote in the memo.
Amazon Care began in 2019 as a pilot program for employees in and around the company’s headquarters in Seattle. The service allows for virtual emergency visits, as well as free telehealth consultations and paid home visits from nurses for testing and vaccinations.
The service has been in the making for several years. In 2017, Amazon held a secret meeting in Seattle to learn more about patient care, attended by heavyweights from the healthcare industry. reports CNBC. This then hired a small group of doctors to set up a pilot clinic for some employees.
In February, the company rolls out Amazon Virtual Care offers nationwide to its employees and other businesses, suggesting it has bigger ambitions for the service.
It’s not clear how much Amazon Care got. Last June, Babak Parviz, a vice president who works on Amazon Care, said Amazon has attracted several companies interested in using the service. Its corporate clients include Hilton, Silicon Labs, TrueBlue and Amazon-owned premium grocer Whole Foods.
Amazon is dropping the service, even as CEO Andy Jassy vows to break into the health care industry. Last month, Amazon to acquire boutique primary care provider One Medical for $3.9 billion. He also strived develop medical diagnostics at home. And earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal according to Amazon bids for a home health care provider Mark health.
Here is the full notice to employees:
Health Services Team,
We are working on an important, missional opportunity. Our vision is to make it easier for people to access the health products and services they need to stay healthy. We know it won’t be easy or quick, but we believe it’s important.
One of the ways we’ve pursued this vision over the past few years has been through our emergency and primary care service offering, Amazon Care. During this time we have collected and listened to extensive feedback from our business customers and their employees and developed a service to continuously improve the customer experience. However, despite these efforts, we have determined that Amazon Care is not the right long-term solution for our business customers and have decided to no longer offer Amazon Care after December 31, 2022.
This decision was not taken lightly and only became clear after several months of careful consideration. While our members loved many aspects of Amazon Care, it’s not a complete enough offering for the large business customers we were targeting, and it won’t work in the long term.
Our work building Amazon Care has deepened our understanding of what it takes to deliver meaningful healthcare solutions for businesses and individual customers over the long term. You’ve heard me say it before, but I believe the field of health care is ripe for innovation, and our efforts to help improve the health care experience can have a tremendously positive impact on our quality of life and health outcomes. But none of these reasons make 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, whatever path you take. Many Care employees will have the opportunity to join other parts of the healthcare organization or other groups at Amazon – which we will discuss with many of you shortly – and we will also support employees looking for roles outside of the company.
Thank you to the Amazon Care and Care Medical team for all your hard work over the past few years. We should be very proud of what this team has been able to achieve in such a short period of time. I would also like to thank our members and business customers for trusting us with their care; this is not a responsibility we take lightly. Learning from Amazon Care, we will continue to innovate, learn from our customers and industry partners, and hold ourselves to the highest standards as we continue to help transform the future of healthcare.
With respect,
Neil
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