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  Today in health IT Amazon Eyes expansion of in-person healthcare to 20 more cities. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. I wanna thank our sponsor for today's Sirius Healthcare.

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Dot com. Alright, here is today's story, and it's interesting. It is. Amazon is looking to expand into 20 more cities. We've been following this since the start. We've talked about the app. We've talked about the services that they offer, and we said, look, this is gonna continue to grow, has . Taken a couple of interesting turns, but this is really the continuation, the evolution of Haven and the work that was going on there.

In fact, some people would say that the three companies were not well. Aligned to begin with, and that because Amazon was so progressive and wanted to move much faster, that that was one of the reasons the organization fell apart. I think there's a lot of reasons why the organization fell apart, but regardless, let's take a look at what Amazon is doing.

This comes from Business Insider had the scoop. So I'm gonna read some of this. Also, I'm gonna refer to a Becker's Healthcare summary of some articles as well. So this is from the Becker's article. Amazon has plans to bring in-person healthcare to 20 more major cities by the end of 2022. Business insider reported September 7th, Amazon Care, the e-Commerce Giants healthcare ventures that offers telemedicine.

And in-person primary care launched as a pilot program in 2019. It initially only was available to Amazon's . Seattle employees and their dependents, but Amazon later expanded it to all employees in Washington State and announced plans in March to expand to other employers across the country. However, the in-person component of the venture was limited to Washington State, Washington, DC and Baltimore.

According to the report. Now Amazon is looking to bring both telehealth and in-person care to Philadelphia, Chicago, Dallas, and Boston in 2021. People familiar. With the deal told Insider. Additionally, the company plans to bring in-person Amazon Care to 16 cities in 2022. The cities are Atlanta, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, Nashville, Tennessee, New York City, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, San Jose, California.

And St. Louis in July, insider reported that Amazon Care approached several big health insurers in an effort to expand coverage of its services. The healthcare venture reportedly talked to Aetna Premera Blue Cross and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. Securing health insurance coverage or joining an insurer's network would be a big step for Amazon Care as it would allow the company to expand services.

To more companies and patients, it would allow insured people to use Amazon Care as they would any other in-network provider. Currently, Amazon Care works with employers that pay a monthly fee for employees to access its services, including Amazon itself, Peloton owned Precore, and several others. All right.

That's the story. That's the progress that they're making. What is the, so what, you know previously on the, so what I've talked about, the challenge of allowing organizations to get in between you and your consumer, you and your patient, and I think that is true. I think we can also look at this model depending on the size of your organization as something that has elements that we should be offering

To the employers in our communities, right? So it's about convenience. They have a very easy to use app where they can speak to a care navigator, speak to a clinician very quickly. It has dispatch capabilities, the ability to get a clinician to come to you where you're at. So it has that convenience factor.

It can send a clinician to your office, it can send a clinician. To your home. Both are types of services that, again, are driven by Amazon's relentless belief in the consumer and making things easier for the consumer. It also obviously, has a strong telehealth component. It has logistics capabilities. Now.

What I hear from people when I talk about this is there's no way to compete with Amazon on logistics, and that is absolutely true, but there are partnerships that could be done by major health systems to have similar types of capabilities to get prescriptions and durable goods and those kind of things to people's homes in a timely fashion.

But people want to get their health from . Their local healthcare provider from the doctor that they see on a regular basis, they have a high degree of trust in those organizations, much more so than big tech. But big tech is slowly cracking the code on accessibility, the ease of use. They're reducing the friction, and that's the area that health systems.

We'll need to bolster their capabilities moving forward, both digitally as well as logistically, and having those operations be able to support the digital foundation. So that's all for today. If you know of someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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