Amazon Care, the company’s app-based healthcare service for employees, will soon launch nationwide, Insider reports.
The service is currently only available to the company's employees based in Washington, but Amazon is getting ready to offer it to others around the country. The company will also invite employers to use it.
As part of the planned expansion, Amazon Care plans to provide telehealth to its employees in all 50 states.
Insider reported that by offering Amazon Care nationally, the company will put a stake in the ground in healthcare delivery, not only pills and devices.
It will also mark the first time that the company has made clear the reason behind Amazon Care is not just to serve the company’s own employees, but also to stand up to a lucrative healthcare business in the $3.8 trillion industry, while also seeking to solve for other employers the problems of shared cost.
This, however, is not the company’s only recent attempt at entering healthcare delivery, as Crossover Health announced this past week that it would team up with the company to serve Amazon employees and their families in the metropolitan regions of five major cities: Dallas, Phoenix, Louisville, Detroit and San Bernardino, California.
The project also includes the launch of 17 health centers to give in-person care, although it is not clear how this might provide some of the same service as an expansion of Amazon Care.
Insider had reported in December on the rumored expansion of Amazon Care, stating that it planned to provide health services to workers at other companies.
Also, STAT reported earlier this month that Care Medical, which contracts with Amazon Care to provide those services, had filed to do business in over a dozen other states, according to HIMSS.
Amazon has kept quiet following these rumors, but it most likely will have to deal with changing regulations regarding licensing and telehealth.
Meanwhile, the company's Haven initiative, which was founded along with J.P. Morgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway, announced two months ago that it would halt its operations.
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