Today in health, it, the story is Amazon care signs, new companies to their service. 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 health Eric's is my company. I provide executive coaching advisory and board participation for health leaders.

Around technology in it. If you want to learn more, check out health, lyrics.com. All right. Here's today's story. But before we get to today's story, short followup to yesterday, some perceived yesterday's podcast as an epic bash. And that was not my intention. I'm not really backing off of what I said, but that wasn't my intention. I'm

Already on the record is saying that Judy and epic have done more for health care providers than any other company on the planet. Before they got going, the failure rate in the HR implementations was embarrassing, even dangerous. Uh, no one in healthcare listens to their clients and responds better than epic across all product sets. No CEO is more connected to their customers than Judy and we are a thousand percent better off because they exist in healthcare. All that being said, there is no free pass on this topic.

I think this will impact the future of healthcare. More than any other topic out there. That's patient directed interoperability. And, you know, , from my perspective, epic, especially epic. Is someone with a significant amount of influence in the industry. And they're held to a higher standard. They're a leader in the industry and with great power comes great responsibility. As we learned in the first Spider-Man movie and maybe some other historical references out there, and I do hold epic to a higher standard, they should be leading in this area. And that is my expectation. . I do recognize that I didn't come down on a Thena health or Allscripts. So let me go ahead and say right now I expect them to participate as well. This is good for patients, and I expect the leadership of all EHR companies to recognize that recognize that it doesn't prohibit their efforts, but because of its potential, good, it must be supported. All right. Enough for yesterday, let's get to today's story. Today's story comes from the wall street journal. Amazon has signed up multiple companies to its tele-health service. Amazon care service is set to scale up and will need thousands of employees. Executives say

this comes from an interview with an executive. Buyback Parviz P a R V I Z on Wednesday. The tech giant has used Amazon care for employees in Seattle since 2019, and is highly rated by its employees. The service begins with a chat bot that allows for a virtual visit with a health professional. If needed a mobile medic will visit a user within 60 minutes. Wow.

The medic is capable of conducting routine tests, such as strep throat, giving vaccinations, or even taking blood samples. Prescriptions can be delivered to the person's address within two hours. Mr. Parvin said. It's quite different from anything we've had in the past. And I think we can all agree. That is quite different than anything we've had in the past.

Amazon is expanding the digital component of the service to all 50 states this summer and plans to bring the full service to Baltimore and Washington DC area soon. The company wants to expand to the full service over time. He said reaching that scale will require thousands of employees. The services offered as an add on service to employer healthcare plans and Amazon plans to announce new companies that have signed up later in the summer.

All right, let's go down a little further in the article. The success of Amazon's expansion into healthcare is still to be determined. Remote care industry executives have said that the company could get buy-in for its tele-health program from other corporations. That already use Amazon web services. Amazon hasn't revealed what it is charging for the service, but it could gain traction based on low costs. And if companies believe remote care can significantly reduce the workforce.

Healthcare costs industry executives say I would go one step further and say, this is the perfect time for this. I mean, we were looking at a potential retention challenge across our employee base. We're looking for additional benefits to really differentiate our organization. This is one of those types of benefits. All right. The company has seen the perils of highly regulated and it goes on to talk about Haven, JP Morgan, chase, Berkshire Hathaway, and how they've been humbled.

And Mr. Parviz actually closes the article with that. We have to approach this with a sense of humility. We know that there's a lot that we do not know, but also with a sense of optimism, we do intend to do something good.

All right. That's the story. Let me give you my, so what, and as you know, at the end of these stories, I try to do a, so what, why does this matter? Amazon is coming, but you already know that that's like no duh consulting, , telling you that Amazon's on their way. , Teladoc and United healthcare is more of a threat to current healthcare providers than Amazon right now.

, more on that next week, we have a story and an interview with the Teladoc. CEO, which I think reveals a lot about where they're going and what they're doing, but I think that's a bigger threat today. I mean, they've stepped in. Between the patient and the provider and they are redirecting sub-services today. So that's more of a threat today.

So we have that going on today and we have Amazon to look forward to, but Amazon's biggest leg up on anyone else is their ability to bridge the digital and physical world with unmatched logistics. If you wonder why there's a fixation on them in healthcare is because no other company in history can match that capability. Not apple, not Google, not Microsoft or ups or FedEx.

The only two that are really even close are CVS and Walmart. Turning a really cool app into an onsite visit and meds within 24 hours is unparalleled. And that's why we keep an eye on this

because it has the chance to really change how we experience healthcare. That's all for today. If you know 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,

apple, Google overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, you get the picture. We are everywhere. We want to thank our channel sponsors or investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders vmware hill-rom ???? starburst advisers mcafee and aruba networks thanks for listening that's all for