(New York) After drugs, telemedicine and vaccines, Amazon is further accelerating its investments in the health sector and will buy the One Medical healthcare network for 3.9 billion US dollars.
Posted at 9:12
Updated at 11:53 a.m.
The Seattle group has set its sights on this young company which has made technology an essential and differentiating aspect of its offer.
He thus aims for a “reinvention” of the care sector, said in a press release Neil Lindsay, vice president of the health division of Amazon.
Originally an online book seller, Amazon has continued to diversify since its creation in 1994, from supermarkets (Whole Foods) to streaming (Prime Video) to cloud computing (cloud computing).
In 2019, the Seattle giant launched a telemedicine service, called Amazon Care.
Initially dedicated to company employees only, the offer, which also includes home visits, was made available in 2021 to all companies in the United States.
In 2020, Amazon also launched a prescription drug delivery platform, Amazon Pharmacy.
Previously, the group founded by Jeff Bezos had given up on an ambitious project, launched in 2018, for a new health care support system with the bank JPMorgan Chase and the Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate.
We think health care is pretty high on the list of services that need reinventing.
Neil Lindsay, Vice President of Amazon’s Health Division
Race between tech giants
Like its telemedicine service, Amazon says it wants to develop a more modern health offer, which is more adapted to current lifestyles, more personalized and less time-consuming.
“We see many opportunities to improve service quality and save people time,” the manager said.
One Medical is led by San Francisco-based 1Life Healthcare, which went public in early 2020.
In the early afternoon of Thursday, the title 1Life Healthcare took more than 69% and approached the price offered by Amazon, or $ 18 per share.
One Medical offers a subscription for US$199 per year that guarantees access to 24-hour online consultation and other services.
The formula does not include payment of the cost of the consultations, which is invoiced to the patient’s health insurer or to their One Medical partner employer.
The network had, at the end of 2021, more than 8,500 corporate clients and, at the end of March, 767,000 subscribers.
1Life Healthcare is not yet profitable and recorded, in 2021, a loss of 254 million US for a turnover of 623 million US.
The healthcare sector is whetting the appetites of tech giants, who see it as a natural extension of their business, from the perspective of dematerialization, artificial intelligence and data management.
On Wednesday, Apple released a lengthy document highlighting the capabilities of the iPhone and the Apple Watch smartwatch to allow users to monitor their health status.
The apple firm also highlighted its collaborative work in the medical field, whether recruiting patients for clinical studies or managing a personalized medical file.
For its part, Amazon is currently participating in the clinical trial of a vaccine against breast and skin cancer, in collaboration with a cancer research center in Seattle.
Alphabet is not to be outdone and already collaborates with several players in the sector, to which it notably provides artificial intelligence services.
The group also invested in the young health insurance company Oscar Health and concluded, in 2020, a strengthened partnership with the telemedicine platform Amwell, injecting in particular $100 million into its capital.