Amazon has ambitious plans to expand its virtual care services as well as in-home care to more than 20 major U.S. cities this year and in 2022, according to a media report.
Amazon Care’s in-person care service had been limited to Washington state, Washington, D.C. and Baltimore but the tech giant plans to expand home-care visits to Philadelphia, Chicago, Dallas and Boston this year, Insider's Blake Dodge reported Tuesday, citing three people familiar with the plans.
In September 2019, Amazon launched a pilot of its virtual health service benefit for employees and their families in the Seattle region called Amazon Care.
The service offers virtual visits, in-person primary care visits at patients' homes or offices and prescription delivery. The company then opened up the medical business to employers around the country this summer by offering its virtual care service to companies and Amazon employees in all 50 states.
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Services include video care, in-app text chat with clinicians, mobile care visits, prescription delivery from a care courier and in-person care, where Amazon Care can dispatch a medical professional to a patient’s home for services ranging from routine blood draws to listening to a patient’s lungs.
Amazon executives said in March the in-person service would expand to other cities in the coming months but didn't name specific cities.
In June, Amazon Care executive Babak Parviz said the tech giant has signed on multiple employers to its healthcare service as part of the national expansion of its virtual health service benefit. One of Amazon Care's clients is Precor, a Washington-based fitness equipment company that was acquired by Peloton.
Parviz said Amazon was committed to eventually expanding the full Amazon Care service, including in-person services, to all 50 states.
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In 2022, Amazon is proposing to bring in-person Amazon Care to 16 more cities, bringing the total number of new additions to 20: Atlanta; Denver; Detroit; Houston; Indianapolis; Kansas City, Missouri; Los Angeles; Miami; Minneapolis; Nashville, Tennessee; New York; Phoenix; Pittsburgh; San Francisco; San Jose, California; and St. Louis, Dodge reported, citing the three sources.
The people, who have direct knowledge of Amazon's plans, spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media. Their identities are known to Insider.
About 40,000 people were enrolled in Amazon Care as of earlier this summer, the people said, though that's heavily weighted to Amazon employees, Dodge reported.
Amazon Care's expansion also comes as the tech giant also moves into at-home testing as it got the green light from the FDA to begin hawking its own COVID-19 test directly to consumers.
Amazon has been rapidly expanding its reach in the healthcare space, most notably in 2018 with its acquisition of online pharmacy PillPack. In November, the tech giant launched Amazon Pharmacy that enables customers to purchase prescription drugs online and have them shipped to their homes.
Amazon also teamed up with trendy tech-enabled primary care group Crossover Health to launch health centers in five major regions—Dallas-Fort Worth, Phoenix, Louisville, Detroit and two California metro areas—to serve Amazon employees and their families.