Amazon starts health care service for Seattle employees

SEATTLE — In its most direct foray yet into the $3.8 trillion medical sector, Amazon has launched a pilot program to administer health care services to many of its nearly 54,000 Seattle-area employees and their families.

An app, called Amazon Care, provides on-demand chat and video consultations with medical professionals and enables users to schedule in-person visits with clinicians at patients’ homes or offices. Payment for the service routes through Amazon.com.

While Amazon has not hinted it plans to make Amazon Care available beyond its own 500,000-person U.S. workforce, industry watchers say Amazon’s history of aggressive expansion, and its recent interest in the health care sector, suggest the company may have more far-reaching ambitions for the service.

“Amazon is in the business of reinventing business models,” said Michael Abrams, managing partner at health care management consulting firm Numerof & Associates. “The kind of organization Amazon is suggests they’re not going to stop with their own 54,000 people in Seattle, or their half-million people nationally. They’re going to be scaling this up.”

The service could also shrink health care costs for the company, a concern for employers nationally as premiums rise at nearly twice the rate of inflation, to an average of roughly $20,000 per family in 2019, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

CNBC first reported in summer 2018 that Amazon planned to open primary care clinics for Seattle-area employees. Amazon Care appears to be a step toward such plans.

Amazon Care clinicians are employed by Oasis Medical Group, which Amazon describes as “a medical practice licensed in Washington state.”

Oasis, which does not have a website, was founded in April 2018 by Dr. Martin Levine.

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