Amazonifying primary care

Amazon is buying One Medical for $3.9 billion, and the deal’s not only shaking up direct-to-consumer care, but employer-based health care as well. Some consumers are less than pleased that Amazon — in addition to being their grocer via Whole Foods, their convenience store via Prime and their home assistant via Alexa — is poised to be their primary care provider, too. But convenient digital primary care access may outweigh any data concerns.

Consumers and human resource managers will have to decide themselves whether to embrace an Amazonified One Medical. The purchase may ring antitrust alarm bells, but it will be difficult for regulators to target as it’s not a monopoly in the traditional sense.

• Christina Farr, a health tech investor with OMERS Ventures, said the deal may signal Amazon’s ambitions to build a “digital front door” to health care.
• Primary care is increasingly elusive for most Americans. “For so many people, convenience trumps anything else,” Farr said. “If they're going to offer a convenient, affordable experience for people, then that might be the thing that causes them to join a service like this versus cancel their membership.”
• Bringing retail and primary care together could be transformative. Josh Bersin, an HR industry analyst, described a possible scenario: “Imagine you're clicking through the Amazon web page, you click on a bottle of aspirin, and the website says, ‘Are you having problems with headaches?’” Bersin said. “‘Would you like to visit a clinic? Click here to make an appointment.’ I mean, that's not a bad idea.”

But for some people, Amazon meshing retail and medical businesses together is a terrifying thought. Why? It’s a powerful amount of data.

• Your medical information should be safe under HIPAA. Amazon told me as much: One Medical customers’ HIPAA-protected information will be “handled separately from all other Amazon businesses” and won’t be shared “for advertising or marketing purposes of other Amazon products and services without clear permission from the customer” should the deal close. Compromising your medical data is illegal, and would be devastating for Amazon. Plus, spreading your data around would be rather hard to do considering how decentralized Amazon’s various businesses are.
• But not all health information is protected by HIPAA. Think about your aspirin purchase on Prime, or information from the Amazon Halo band. Americans are even more aware of this secondary health data in a post-Roe world. “The concern is having such a big, powerful company that has [its] hands in so many different areas of people’s lives being able to also gather data about people, even tangentially, around their health,” data privacy expert Debbie Reynolds said.
• Cloud consultant Corey Quinn canceled his One Medical subscription already because of his data concerns. The potential for internal data misuse is enough to deter him: “When you have 1.4 million employees, you can’t guarantee that anything has never happened,” Quinn said. “I don't particularly want the notes from my therapy appointments being something that anyone at Amazon has access to.”

Experts don’t think the data aspect will scare away potential individual or enterprise customers.

• Michael Yang, health tech and workplace tech investor at OMERS Ventures, said the deal likely doesn’t change One Medical’s appeal to enterprises, even if employees have concerns about health data.
• Some companies that could be considered competitors, like Google, host One Medical clinics on site. Could the prospect of hosting Amazon-owned clinics in their facilities spook them? Yang doesn’t think so, given One Medical’s ability to bring health care spending down.
• “It would be penny-wise, pound-foolish to take a stand against a quote-unquote competitor when your employees need it and you as an employer want them to have it,” Yang said.

One Medical isn’t the only option out there, though. If nervous employees lobby against an Amazon-backed One Medical or employers become spooked, enterprises and consumers can always go elsewhere. Once the deal is finalized, it will be interesting to see how an Amazon-owned One Medical pitches itself.

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