Amazon Care

» see amazon.care as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

amazon care never showed up in turkey. it never planned to. the whole product started in september 2019 as a benefit for amazon employees around the seattle campus, and its later expansion was aimed at american corporate hr departments buying telehealth as a perk for their own workers. i was working in ankara on unrelated things when the announcement went out, and my first exposure to the product was the shutdown memo three years later.

the service offered virtual urgent care by video, plus in-person visits from a care navigator for testing and vaccinations delivered by amazon-owned nurses driving to a home or office. in february 2022 amazon flipped it from an amazon-employee benefit to a nationwide b2b offering. it was pitched as the future of employer-provided primary care. six months later, on 24 august 2022, an internal memo went out saying the service would close by year-end.

neil lindsay, running amazon health services, wrote in the memo that although enrolled members had loved many aspects of amazon care, it was not a complete enough offering for the large enterprise customers amazon had been targeting. that is the whole story. amazon care shut down for good on 31 december 2022. the health services team pivoted to the one medical acquisition, which closed a few months later for around 3.9 billion dollars.

~ the case file ~

~ what got buried with it ~

amazon care was one of the few genuinely well-liked amazon healthcare experiments. patients spoke well of the visits and the nurses were reportedly quite good, which is uncommon for a corporate telehealth product built by an e-commerce company. it was still not enough. the enterprise sales cycle wanted an existing patient network plus real clinician relationships. amazon care had neither and was not going to build them fast enough.

~ the funny part ~

the memo essentially conceded that buying an existing primary care company was cheaper than building one inside amazon. one medical was already what amazon care had been trying to become, minus a few years of engineering. so amazon spent three years and an unknown pile of money learning that healthcare is not a category you enter by opening a chat window.

~ the long tail ~

the pattern repeats across the sector. google closed google health in 2011 for similar reasons. microsoft healthvault closed in 2019. tech-company primary care lives inside a very specific problem: the software is easy, the delivery network is not. amazon paid to learn it in public. one medical remains, folded inside amazon, doing what amazon care could not.

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