Amazon Clinic and DTC Healthcare
The tech giant known as Amazon already stepped into all the industries we can think of. What separates it from the competition is the ease of use - after a couple of clicks, you can get whatever you need delivered to your doorstep. But what about healthcare? That’s when Amazon Clinic ensures that healthcare services are as easy to deliver as your favorite book.
What Is Amazon Clinic?
Amazon Clinic is Amazon’s 24/7 direct-to-consumer telehealth service. It can address over 30 common health conditions, create individual treatment plans, and refill medications.
Amazon announced the launching of its clinic in November 2022. So far, it is set to operate in 33 states, with the expectations that it will spread throughout the United States soon. The clinic, which will function as the extension of Amazon Pharmacy, will offer the users new benefits and functionalities and will bring digital healthcare as a DTC business model.
What is Amazon Pharmacy?
Amazon Pharmacy is an online pharmacy service offered by Amazon.com. It allows customers to purchase prescription medications and have them delivered directly to their homes. The service was launched in November 2020 in the United States.
With Amazon Pharmacy, customers can create an account, provide their prescription information, and order medications through the Amazon website or the Amazon mobile app. The service offers a wide range of prescription medications, including both brand-name and generic drugs. It is important to note that the pharmacy and the clinic fall under Amazon Healthcare, a service to bring digital health directly to the consumer. It comes with a wide range of benefits, most notably regarding the payment.
When placing an order, customers can use their health insurance to pay for their prescriptions or choose to pay out of pocket. Amazon Prime members receive additional benefits, such as free two-day shipping on prescription orders and access to discounted prices on certain medications. Amazon Pharmacy also provides tools and features to help customers manage their medications. This includes organizing prescriptions into personalized profiles, setting up automatic refills, and receiving medication reminders.
Amazon Care thus ensures easy, speedy, and accurate care delivery for many conditions. It also comes with significant cost reductions for patients, as telehealth services are cheaper than traditional in-person visits.
How Does Amazon Clinic Work?
The clinic works just like Amazon’s other services: sign in to your Amazon account, find the condition for which you need treatment, and wait less than a couple of hours to receive a treatment plan. The fee for using telehealth by Amazon is around $30 and is not covered by insurance (although this might vary from state to state).
What comes as a potential issue is the way Amazon handles storing and sharing protected health information. It is questionable whether HIPAA (signed into law by President Clinton in 1996) can adequately protect patient information, given the amount of health data and modern, digital ways of information storing and sharing.
What Conditions Does Amazon Clinic Treat?
Right now, Amazon offers treatment for more than 30 common healthcare conditions segregated into four different categories. Getting treatment is as simple as choosing your health condition and your state of residence, finding available virtual clinics, and choosing the one that suits you best. Amazon Clinic offers treatment for the following conditions:
General Health
Acid reflux
Gour flares
Smoking
Cold sores
Motion Sickness
Seasonal Allergies
COVID-19
Pink eye
Sinus Infection
Sexual Health
Bacterial vaginosis
Erectile dysfunction
Period cramps
Vaginal yeast infection
Birth control
Genital herpes
Premature ejaculation
UTI
Emergency contraception
Genital warts
Vaginal dryness
Skin and Hair
Acne
Dandruff
Male hair loss
Anti-aging skin care
Eczema
Rosacea
Athlete’s foot
Eyelash growth
Prescription Renewals
Asthma
High cholesterol
EpiPens
Hypothyroidism
High blood pressure
Migraine
Amazon Healthcare and the Quality of Care
Direct-to-consumer health services come with the danger of deteriorated healthcare delivery. After all, it is software, and even artificially intelligent software has been known to make mistakes in the past.
A lack of transparency and regulation could impose an issue for many consumers. The healthcare sector has been the number one target of cybercriminals for the past consecutive 12 years. With an increase in data quantity, it is necessary to install proper security measures and to prevent any potential data leaks.
Further, even though patients are now looking for telehealth in their healthcare service provider, 44% of patients still prefer in-person visits, and this number is higher for persons over the age of 65. A little less than half of all patients aren’t fully prepared to engage with telehealth services, despite many patients reporting that they would switch their care provider if they didn’t offer telehealth as a service.
Digital Amazon Health offers users convenience and speedy answers to their healthcare problems. However, as a telehealth service, it lacks in certain areas. Some medical conditions require a physical examination. Additionally, poor technical capabilities, such as poor internet or audio or video connectivity could decrease the quality of telehealth service.
To avoid these potential problems, it is still recommended not to use Amazon Clinic as a replacement for a care practitioner. Instead, telehealth should be utilized as a supplement to a care provider for minor conditions or management of well-documented chronic care conditions. The safest and most effective option would be a form of hybrid healthcare.
Our Expertise
Three decades in the healthcare industry? Check. Amazon partners? Check. Ability to develop a telehealth solution for your exact needs? Check and check.
While patients can use Amazon Clinic on its own, we can help you develop software to offer telehealth services to your patients. Check out some of our successful solutions below, and reach out for a free consultation.
