Amazon is launching a virtual care (i.e., telemedicine) choice for its Seattle employees in collaboration with Oasis Medical Group, a family medicine clinic in Seattle (see: Amazon launches Amazon Care, a telemedicine-driven care offering for Seattle employees). Here is an excerpt from the article:
Amazon is launching Amazon Care, a virtual primary care offering for its Seattle-based employees....Amazon Care will include telemedicine, online chat with a nurse, medication delivery, and app-enabled house calls to the employee's office or home. Amazon is not employing any doctors; instead the company is contracting with a local clinic called Oasis Medical Group....It is not being offered or recommended for emergency care. The news comes after more than a year of rumors that Amazon was considering its own clinic for employees, and the industry has already seen plenty of speculation about what the move might mean. A key question is whether this will remain a service for Amazon employees only, or if the company is planning to eventually offer it as a direct-to-consumer healthcare product in its own right. Amazon is following in the footsteps of Apple, which quietly launched its own employee clinic network called AC Wellness in early 2018. If Amazon Care is going to be offered more broadly eventually, it could connect with several other Amazon entreés into healthcare, such as the company's PillPack acquisition or Haven, its much-ballyhooed JV with Berkshire-Hathaway and JP Morgan.
I believe that virtual care will inevitably become an important element in first-tier healthcare (see: Defining and Delineating the Changing First Tier of Healthcare) whether offered by CVS, Walgreens, Walmart or a health system like Cleveland Clinic, Kaiser, or Intermountain. This approach to healthcare is now being adopted by providers like CVS with its Video Visits program. CVS has generally staffed its walk-in MinuteClinics with nurse practitioners (NPs) and they also appear to be providing the virtual care visits.
This is in contrast to the virtual care visits offered by the Cleveland Clinic which launched its program more than four years ago with family practice MDs (see: Cleveland Clinic Launches Web Site to Offer Physician Visits to Ohio Residents) but is now branching out into allergy and immunology, dermatology, and pediatric visits. Once a provider builds its virtual care IT infrastructure, it can then then offer visits with specialist physicians in addition to PCPs. Dermatology visits are a good example of such an initiative because diagnoses can be made in many cases on the basis of the gross appearance of a skin lesion.
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