Online retailer Amazon has taken the unexpected decision to close its Amazon Care telemedicine division. It provided corporate medical services, and the list of clients included Hilton and Silicon Labs. According to experts, the decision to close the service does not mean that Amazon has lost interest in the medical field – the company will most likely continue to develop this direction.
Amazon will close the Amazon Care division, which specialized in corporate telemedicine, by the end of the year. The company sent out a statement to its employees yesterday. The publication was the first to report GeekWirelater in response to media inquiries at Amazon confirmed this information.
Amazon Care was created in 2019. A few years before that, the company was actively interested in the healthcare sector, hiring doctors, etc. At first, the division served only employees of Amazon itself – primarily as a telemedicine service, but also organized face-to-face visits by nurses, for example for COVID-19 testing and vaccinations. In February, Amazon Care began providing telemedicine services to other US corporations. Among the corporate clients of the service are the Hilton hotel chain, the semiconductor developer Silicon Labs, and the TrueBlue HR service. The total number of service customers is unknown.
Neil Lindsey, head of Amazon Health Services, said in a letter to employees that the decision to close the service was difficult and the company has been considering it for several months.
According to Mr. Lindsey, Amazon Care turned out to be an inappropriate and insufficiently comprehensive offer for large corporate customers in the long run.
For many experts, the closure of Amazon Care came as a surprise, as the corporation has been actively investing in healthcare lately. Most analysts believe that the decision to close Amazon Care does not mean that the corporation will not expand in this area. “This is by no means a sign of failure. This is a strategic move,” said Natalie Shibell, an analyst at Forrester Research.
Just a month ago Amazon agreed about the purchase of primary health care service 1Life Healthcare (One Medical brand) for nearly $4 billion. According to Christina Farr, a medtech investment specialist at Omers Ventures, the closure of Amazon Care may be partly due to this purchase, since One Medical also provides enterprise services and the two services could duplicate each other. According to the American media, Amazon is also one of the contenders for the purchase of the Signify Health medical service, which, among other things, also deals with telemedicine.