Amazon’s feint into large employer telehealth; HealthLake dives into structured health data analytics

Much ado about…..? Amazon is reportedly making an effort to lure large employers into its Amazon Care telehealth and in-person care platform. Amazon Care is a health benefit presently offered to Amazon employees, with telehealth nationally and in-person for Seattle area residents.  

About 300 Amazon employees use it, which is low given their employee size and after 15 months. Since internal takeup has to date been limited, this Editor observes that Amazon may be testing the scaleup waters by inviting other companies in. These reports indicate that online real estate marketplace Zillow was approached but has moved no further with it. Companies would be charged a per member per month fee plus a ‘technology fee’. 

For those interested in telehealth’s positioning among US employers, the Credit Suisse report by Jailendra Singh’s team makes important points on where both Teladoc and Amwell stand with employers and health plans–and it’s not promising for Amazon:

  • Telehealth has been adopted by 90 percent of employers, but it’s a fraction of benefit spending for them
  • What’s important to employers is not the cost of the program, but employee engagement, the potential volume of medical cost savings, and management of chronic conditions
  • Telehealth vendors are increasingly ‘carved into’ contracted health plans
  • Between direct employer contracts and health plans, Teladoc is settled into this segment, and diversified into medical systems with new acquisitions InTouch Health and chronic care management with Livongo. Amwell is situated in the white-label provider market with health systems and health plans, with few employer contracts. 

 AMZN Making a Push in Telehealth For Large Employers: Appears to Be More Noise than Substance

A better-positioned initiative for healthcare providers that Amazon just announced is HealthLake, which is a HIPAA-eligible AWS cloud service for storing and analyzing structured and unstructured data at petabyte scale. The ‘lake’ is the data lake in the cloud. It copies health data in the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) format, and analyzes unstructured data uses specialized machine learning models, like natural language processing, to automatically extract meaningful medical information. Current users, according to their website, are Cerner, Konica Minolta, and Orion Health. Hat tip to HISTalk.