The same eCommerce giant that brought us one-click checkout is well on its way to bringing us one-click healthcare, with Amazon Clinic now available in all 50 states.
Amazon’s blog post sticks to the company’s roots by positioning Amazon Clinic as a “virtual health care marketplace,” allowing patients to compare treatment options for 30+ common conditions like pink eye or allergies.
The clinicians delivering the actual care appear to be from four partner networks: Curai, Hello Alpha, SteadyMD, and Wheel.
- Users can see the cost of each provider, as well as the average wait time, although notably absent is any sort of care quality metric for the desired condition.
- They can then select either an asynchronous chat or a live video visit delivered directly through Amazon.com / the Amazon app, and medications can be conveniently fulfilled by Amazon Pharmacy. Sounds great on paper.
It’s easy to picture this playing out the same way that Amazon’s eCommerce marketplace unfolded, with telehealth costs kicking off a race to the bottom that’s great for consumers and less great for margins.
- Amazon Clinic’s provider partners just got a massive boost to visibility (and probably volume), and we could see more traditionally B2B telehealth vendors enrolling to get the same perks.
- Amazon also gains a treasure trove of user data, a new gateway to Amazon Pharmacy (One Medical referrals could easily be on the way), and it doesn’t seem far-fetched to think the Amazon Basics playbook of copying/acquiring outperformers is on the roadmap.
The Takeaway
Convenience is king with all consumers, and Amazon is hard at work blurring the line between patient and consumer. This probably wasn’t news that Ro or Hims loved to see, given that they offer overlapping services without the benefit of two billion website visitors every month. Case in point, Amazon.com publicized the Clinic expansion with a homepage banner reading “healthcare for those ‘can’t wait’ days,” possibly the single most valuable ad slot for a D2C telehealth launch of all time.
