Amazon Breaks Into The Medical Field!

Amazon today has said it has entered an agreement to acquire primary healthcare company One Medical in an all-cash deal valued at approximately $3.9 billion.

One Medical is a membership-based primary care service that promises customers “24/7 access to virtual care.” The company operates in a dozen major US markets, according to its website, and works with over 8,000 companies to offer One Medical health benefits to their employees.

In a statement announcing the acquisition, Neil Lindsay, senior vice president of Amazon Health Services, said the e-commerce giant thinks “health care is high on the list of experiences that need reinvention.” Lindsay added that Amazon hopes to be one of the companies “that helps dramatically improve the healthcare experience over the next several years.”

The acquisition is just the latest example of the tech giant expanding its footprint in the healthcare industry. Amazon acquired PillPack, an online pharmacy, in 2018 and later launched its own digital pharmacy in the United States. Separately, Amazon partnered with JP Morgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway on an effort to provide better health care services and insurance at a lower cost to workers and families at the three companies, and possibly other businesses, too. That effort, called Haven, shut down last year.

With the One Medical deal, Amazon would gain access to physical health clinics and “payer and hospital system relationships,” Evercore ISI analyst Elizabeth Anderson said in a note Thursday morning.
Headquartered in San Francisco, One Medical has seen demand for its services surge in recent years amid the Covid-19 pandemic and the rise of the telehealth sector. In its most-recent quarterly earnings report, One Medical said it had a total membership count of 767,000, up 28% year-over-year. One Medical went public in January 2020.