Why Did Amazon Buy One Medical?

Amazon bought One Medical for $3.9 billion and we should not be surprised.

I always said if these tech giants are serious about healthcare then they need to have skin in the game. They need to feel the regulatory pain and financial losses.

Looks like Amazon is doing just that now.

Lets put our personal feelings aside and actually look at what Amazon is doing.

• Delivery infrastructure - pretty self explanatory. They have literally changed how long we are willing to wait for packages.

• Data Storage and Analytics - Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been the reason why they are able to undercut the competition and still make record profits.

• Nutrition - They own Whole Foods Market and with Amazon Fresh they can deliver your food right to your door.

• Pharmacy services - They bought Pill Pack so they are able to deliver medications to the patients home. Maybe now they increase pharmacy services with Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) and Medication Therapy Management (MTM).

• Home Healthcare - They are building an infrastructure with Amazon Care for their employees. They have now announced they are going to shut this program down.

• Telehealth - They dipped their toes in with a partnership with Teladoc which allowed customers to connect with Teladoc physicians via Amazon Echo’s

• Primary Care - They just bought One Medical. As you can see this like Thanos was inevitable. And right now is a good time to buy with the digital health landscape looking bleak and valuations starting to drop.

What is next?

• Insurance and specialty care - It is not a matter of if it is a matter of when at this point.

• Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) subscription service - I could see them rolling out DTC subscription service bundled in with your prime subscription. One stop shop from the comfort of your own home.

• Healthcare Ecommerce - Ecommerce is already in healthcare. They will have the data and they can start targeting you for their services based on your shopping habits and prescriptions etc. The morality of this is something we will need to sort out quickly, but to think that this will not happen is not living in this reality.

• Wearable Devices - They actually make a fitness tracker called Halo. It is not very popular but they are in the space. They also have experience making other devices with their Echo, Fire Stick, and Fire Tablet. So, it is not too far of a stretch to think they won’t try to get larger share in the space as RPM keeps gaining traction.

As you see the grand plan is coming together. All these are deliberate and very calculated moves. Now do they have patience to follow through? Only time will tell. But, they are turning into that 800 pound gorilla in the room that cannot be ignored anymore.

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