mazon unveiled its latest healthcare play on Wednesday: offering steeply discounted memberships to One Medical, the primary care company it acquired this year for $3.5 billion, to its tens of millions of Amazon Prime U.S. customers. It’s another in a series of experiments by the retail behemoth to carve off a slice of the $4.3 trillion U.S. healthcare market.
“We definitely don’t think about it as competition,” he explained. “We think about it in terms of choice, convenience and then continuity of care.” Compared to One Medical, which employs its own doctors, Amazon Clinic is essentially a partnership between Amazon and a number of digital health startups, including Wheel, SteadyMD, Hello Alpha and Curai Health, who provide the medical care while Amazon connects them with patients. Lindsay said this approach of offering customers choice is consistent with Amazon’s bigger strategy beyond healthcare.
Lindsay declined to comment on any specific financials and the current direction of the business as far as the split between the consumer-side and Medicare-side. “It's still day one. It's very early in our time in healthcare generally,” said Lindsay when asked about One Medical’s profitability, adding there was “so much more opportunity” to make healthcare “more accessible” to Amazon’s customers.