What Could Amazon’s Approach to Health Care Look Like?

Whether pursuing the market for pharmaceutical distribution or teaming up with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase to create joint solutions for reducing health care spending of more than 1 million employees and their families, it is clear that Amazon sees the 18% of U.S. GDP dedicated to health care as fertile ground for expansion. It is worth thinking about Amazon’s efforts in a conditional manner: If Amazon succeeds in changing health care, how might it do so? While Amazon’s collaboration with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase would obviously leverage the purchasing power of three massive employers and could lead to innovative insurance models, it seems that the bigger opportunity would be in improving how care is delivered to patients. At its root, health care is a service that needs to be delivered to a customer. For existing health care companies, the operative words in that mandate have been “health care”; for Amazon, the operative words likely are “service that needs to be delivered to a customer.” To the extent that Amazon’s perspective is correct, it is worth considering the types of experience the company could apply to health care. They include several areas: making routine transactions seamless and reliable; passive data capture; data analytics; and turning efforts to solve internal challenges into businesses.