What’s that got to do with healthcare? If you hate all the headaches of the American healthcare system, your blood pressure might spike as you read Amazon Health Services SVP Neil Lindsay discussing the One Medical deal. It’s not the most productive use of their time, which is how we came up with the idea to build Just Walk Out.” “We’ve always noticed that customers didn’t like standing in checkout lines. “We observed areas that caused friction for customers, and we diligently worked backward to figure out ways to alleviate that friction,” Amazon Physical Retail and Technology VP Dilip Kumar told the New York Times when opening the first Whole Foods with Just Walk Out technology earlier this year. Five years after buying Whole Foods, Amazon has transferred its “Just Walk Out” technology from small Amazon Go convenience stories to select Whole Foods stores. (One Medical reported about 767,000 members for its business as of the end of March.)Īnother example is Amazon’s cashierless grab-and-go shops and stores.

The retail business is a different industry than healthcare, but there are plenty of similarities that the medical device and pharmaceutical industries ought to consider.įor one, Amazon’s retail efforts have always focused on customer convenience, from the early days of online book buying to the patented one-click “buy now” button and fee-generating Prime memberships, which topped 200 million subscribers last year. The deal immediately brought to mind Amazon’s $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods, which to this day remains Amazon’s largest purchase. That was my first thought when reading the news that Seattle-based Amazon (Nasdaq:AMZN) plans to buy One Medical for nearly $4 billion. Amazon Diagnostics’ COVID-19 testing lab in Hebron, Kentucky Amazon’s anti-friction focus will find many opportunities in healthcare.

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