That Amazon Prime membership could soon come with a free same-day doctor’s appointment. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that we need a robust digital healthcare system that extends from the doctor’s office into the home—and the e-commerce Goliath just jumped into the ring prepared to win it all. Investors have flocked to the sector over the past 12 months, and some Wall Street analysts have projected several years of robust growth. However, between last December, when news of Amazon’s planned move into healthcare began leaking in the media, and this March when the company officially announced its plans , stock prices for legacy health companies such as CVS, Walgreens, and digital-first disruptors along the lines of GoodRx lost billions of dollars in value and reshuffled the presumed leaderboard. What can existing healthcare providers do to survive and thrive in the face of what will surely be heated competition? The simple answer is to take a page directly from Amazon’s playbook: Create an incredibly easy-to-use one-stop digital shop for everything prospective patients could ever need and pay obsessive attention to customer experience and satisfaction. Amazon is renowned for taking costly business expenditures—cloud computing, logistics, and fulfillment—and developing solutions that solve internal challenges while also becoming profitable to the company. Next up on the list is healthcare. Amazon plans to offer 24/7 chat access to clinicians, nationwide telemedicine access, in-home diagnostics, health provider house calls in select cities, and prescription drug delivery, all within an easy-to-use interface. Consumers have come to expect frictionless experiences online and in the physical world. Want a ride somewhere? Press a button. Need your groceries? Press a button. However, today, far too many people seeking healthcare must navigate an endless sea of paperwork, providers, insurance companies, and websites from the mid-’90s. And after all that, they often don’t walk away with what they need. Because healthcare in America is not user-friendly, people defer or delay care and let prescriptions go unfilled or unused. Thousands of lives are lost as a result, and these challenges cost the U.S
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Amazon’s healthcare push is a threat—and an opportunity—for the industry