One Medical is a membership-based major care service that guarantees clients “24/7 entry to digital care.” The firm operates in a dozen main US markets, based on its web site, and works with over 8,000 corporations to supply One Medical well being advantages to their staff.
In a press release Thursday asserting the acquisition, Neil Lindsay, senior vp of Amazon Health Services, stated the e-commerce big thinks “well being care is excessive on the checklist of experiences that want reinvention.” Lindsay added that Amazon hopes to be one of many corporations “that helps dramatically enhance the healthcare expertise over the following a number of years.”
The acquisition is simply the most recent instance of the tech big increasing its footprint within the healthcare trade. Amazon acquired PillPack, a web-based pharmacy, in 2018 and later launched its personal digital pharmacy within the United States. Separately, Amazon partnered with JP Morgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway on an effort to offer higher well being care providers and insurance coverage at a decrease price to employees and households on the three corporations, and presumably different companies, too. That effort, known as Haven, shut down final yr.
Amazon lately has broadened its empire from on-line retail to leisure, groceries and extra, growing its huge attain into the lives of shoppers within the course of. The One Medical acquisition can be one of many largest in Amazon’s historical past. Amazon agreed to purchase grocery chain Whole Foods in 2017 for $13.7 billion and earlier this yr closed an $8.5 billion deal to purchase iconic Hollywood film studio MGM.
With the One Medical deal, Amazon would acquire entry to bodily well being clinics and “payer and hospital system relationships,” Evercore ISI analyst Elizabeth Anderson stated in a observe Thursday morning.
Headquartered in San Francisco, One Medical has seen demand for its providers surge lately amid the Covid-19 pandemic and the rise of the telehealth sector. In its most-recent quarterly earnings report, One Medical stated it had a complete membership rely of 767,000, up 28% year-over-year. One Medical went public in January 2020. Shares for 1life Healthcare (ONEM), the father or mother firm of One Medical, surged greater than 65% in early buying and selling Thursday after the announcement. Amazon inventory opened the comparatively flat Thursday. (Shares for CVS Health Corp and Walgreens Boots Alliance dipped barely Thursday morning following the information.)
The deal stays topic to approval from One Medical’s shareholders and regulators.
While Anderson argued there may be minimal antitrust danger given Amazon’s restricted healthcare footprint, some tech trade critics have been fast to boost considerations in regards to the deal, and the info to which the corporate might acquire entry.
“Amazon having again door entry to non-public well being care information is frankly a terrifying thought and calls into focus how desperately Congress must move antitrust reform to forestall these tech giants from abusing their monopoly energy,” Sacha Haworth, govt director of the Tech Oversight Project advocacy group, advised CNN Business in a press release.