Amazon, JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway's buzzy partnership over their employee healthcare announced in January caught plenty of other large employers' attention.
Sure, it could just end up being just another purchasing coalition.
But if it actually takes advantage of the breadth of Amazon's connection with consumers? That could stand to truly—pardon the overused term—"disrupt" healthcare for employers, said National Business Group on Health President and CEO Brian Marcotte.
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"If they begin to leverage Amazon's footprint within the home, their relationship with the consumer, their customer obsession … the customer loyalty they have, and begin to leverage their ability," Marcotte said, it could change everything.
"One of the challenges in healthcare is employees don't touch the system with enough frequency in order for it to be routine, in order for them to be sophisticated consumers," added Marcotte. Amazon and other online shopping platforms are routine, he said.
"When I look at this coming together, the opportunity is how do you leverage their platform to reach people in a more natural way, in a more frequent way then we reach them today," he said.
Marcotte was speaking in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, presenting the 2019 Health Care Strategy and Plan Design Survey. The survey, taken in May and June 2018, included responses from 170 large employers who have a total of 19 million covered.
Those employers indicated they are closely watching for innovations from Silicon Valley.
"They are coming out of that market or out of Boston and other areas. It's not just about the Valley," Marcotte said. "But then we talk about all of these different solutions around physical therapy or emotional health and well-being, or lifestyle management, or sleep, a lot of them are coming from innovations coming out of the Valley."
Seven in ten responding employers said they believe "a new entrant from outside the healthcare industry is necessary to disrupt the market in a positive way," compared to 10% who disagreed.
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When it came to disruptive technologies, the majority of large employers said they believe virtual care will play a significant role in how healthcare is delivered in the future. Nearly as many believe artificial intelligence will. More than half of the employers said their top healthcare initiatives in 2019 are based around implementing more virtual care solutions.
"One of the challenges they have is point-solution fatigue right now," Marcotte said. "There are so many of these solutions on the market they don't necessarily have the bandwidth to contract with them all and then, even if they contract, how to they integrate them in with everything else they have?"
