How Amazon’s Tech and Logistics Prowess Will Disrupt Health – and Create Risk – GeekWire

As Amazon makes big moves into healthcare and turns the efficiency machine on medicine, some experts say the industry could change in a big way.

“Amazon is just starting to climb the mountain,” said Derek Strat, a health technology veteran and CEO of Seattle-based healthcare software startup DexCare.

That mountain is indeed steep. Amazon has invested heavily in healthcare over the years with mixed results. The company ended its Haven partnership with Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan Chase last year. Amazon recently announced plans to shut down its virtual-first service Amazon Care.

But Amazon signaled its continued interest in health care this summer when it announced a $3.9 billion acquisition of its primary care group. The deal, Amazon’s third-largest acquisition, is still being reviewed by regulators.

Given the size, complexity and potential of the technology, the sector has emerged as one of the industries where Amazon can find the fourth pillar of its business to further transform the healthcare market: Amazon Web Services, Amazon Prime, and Amazon Marketplace.

We spoke with healthcare industry leaders to learn more about how the tech giant is leveraging its technology and data capabilities to disrupt other markets.

Amazon has a vast collection of offerings that can be built and scaled.

Amazon already partners with healthcare companies through Amazon Web Services for Health, supporting everything from finance and operations to medical research and patient-clinician interactions. AWS provides tools for extracting health data, monetizing, virtualizing care, and more.

The company will expand on each of these efforts, expand and link to devices such as the HaloView health band, Amazon.com’s e-commerce marketplace and online pharmacy, Strait said.

Amazon’s proposed purchase of One Medical — its third-largest acquisition to date — is similar to Facebook’s (now Meta) acquisition of Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, Strait said.

“We can take this little thing and put it in the engine, and it’s going to be amazing,” Strait thought of Facebook. “And I think it’s the same. If you’re Amazon, think on that scale.

Amazon’s logistics know-how can be valuable for healthcare.

The industry suffers from inefficiencies, delays in care, multiple follow-ups for inspections, fragmented information systems and supply chain issues. Experts say Amazon can partner with multiple health systems to help eliminate inefficiencies and provide supplies and services.

“Amazon’s extraordinary supply chain management and consumer e-commerce platform can be unparalleled assets for selling and delivering goods where they need them,” said Dr. Ken Mandle, director of the Computational Health Informatics Program at Children’s Hospital Boston.

Lee Schwam, physician and vice president of digital patient experience and virtual care at Mass General Brigham, said Amazon could be a “single provider” and look for a way to generate more revenue “in a way that it knows how to do.”

In the year Amazon, which acquired online pharmacy startup PillPack in 2018 and launched Amazon Pharmacy in 2020, could further blur the lines between home care and a hospital or clinic. “The transition to 100% virtual care could be driven by diagnoses related to asynchronous care delivery for certain specialties,” said Streit, who previously founded C-SATS, a Seattle startup that harnesses surgeons and technology. It was acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2018.

One example is managing diabetes through home testing, Streit said. “You can virtualize entire service lines,” he said. In the future, people will spend less time in hospital recovering from illness and surgery and more time at home recovering.

Health systems can benefit from Amazon’s data expertise.

Amazon has the potential to help health systems manage their data, understand patient outcomes, and provide real-time feedback to clinicians. With enough data, Amazon can help predict disease symptoms, predict patient outcomes, and guide people toward medical care or healthy consumer choices.

“Health care suffers from a lack of coordination, resulting in long diagnostic odysseys, unnecessary and duplicated tests and medical errors,” Mandel. “A physician can leverage AWS’s healthcare data integration and machine learning solutions to manage medical records and provide decision support to clinicians and patients.”

Amazon already has access to huge data sets on consumer habits through its marketplace. And while health information is protected by federal privacy regulations, companies can find ways to combine it with consumer information by offering incentives or discounts, Mandle said. It can also augment data sets with connected services at home.

The result can be a lot of information on each patient.

The data embedded in their data science technologies and teams makes them incredibly effective in terms of evaluation. [health] Equality,” Strait said.

There are barriers to effective use of data to predict and improve health outcomes. Consumer health information is dense, often siled across various health groups and surrounded by jargon that obscures meaning. Previous technology efforts to improve health care with data have failed, such as Google’s consumer effort Google Health and IBM’s Watson Health.

But as software tools improve and access to data expands, Amazon may be able to overcome some of these problems. The company will eventually be able to upgrade electronic medical record systems as cumbersome, time-consuming and technologically inflexible, Strait said.

cause for concern

Amazon will have to overcome concerns over data privacy – from regulators and business partners.

On the same day Amazon announced a medical deal, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) wrote a letter to the Federal Trade Commission.

“I also urge the FTC to consider the data’s role as a barrier to entry, as this proposed agreement could put highly sensitive personal health information in the hands of a company that already requests the information,” he wrote. Klobuchar, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights.

Amazon also needs to be careful how it collects and uses data to gain patient and physician trust, which is a key issue in healthcare, said Shantanu Nundy, the healthcare company’s chief medical officer. “Medicine moves at the speed of faith,” he said.

Acquiring a medical presents other potential issues for Amazon as it moves deeper into healthcare.

A medic is a primary health care service, and connects patients to other providers for specialty care.

But academic medical centers like Mass General Brigham have built a large primary care patient base and supported specialty care. Amazon could use the data to weed out the wealthiest and healthiest patients, allowing hospitals to serve as a safety net for the poor, Sham said. That could put hospitals in financial trouble, Strait added, adding that rural health systems are particularly vulnerable.

Schwam worries about Amazon funneling specialty care through a medical center. Amazon can occupy “slots” with specialists by providing faster access to its patients and skewing access to patients outside the system.

According to Schwam, under certain circumstances, everyone wins in the long run: Amazon, existing health care groups and patients. In a single-payer health system, for example, Amazon would contract with the government and the hospitals would remain — although that’s not the case, and one Amazon would likely oppose, Schwam said.

Health systems need to start thinking now about how to adapt as Amazon and other big tech players enter healthcare, Schwam said. He asks: “Have we found a way to collaborate and essentially turn academic health systems into networks of primary care, which is really what it should be, and turn primary care into another fluidity?”

“My prediction is that no one will get it right on the first pass,” Schwam said. “But there will be a lot of learning to go on.”