I
Amazon In Healthcare:
The E-Commerce
Giant’s Strategy For
A $3 Trillion Market
II
Amazon could use its expertise to disrupt
everything from the pharmaceutical supply
chain to medicare management. We break
down the healthcare areas best suited for
an Amazon entrance.
Amazon is looking to dominate more than just online retail.
The e-commerce behemoth is serious about entering
healthcare, bringing with it a non-traditional business model,
infrastructure in logistics & computing, and customer love.
Many existing health giants are scrambling to compete, while
others are looking for ways to Amazon-proof themselves.
But this isn’t Amazon’s first attempt at transforming the space.
Between 1999-2000, the company began investing money into
Drugstore.com with plans to expand its e-commerce business
into the pharmacy space. It eventually ran into the existing
web of middlemen, regulators, and more, which brought its
ambitions to a halt.
Now, Amazon is trying again. Earlier this year, it announced a
joint healthcare venture with JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire
Hathaway. Before the collaboration, the company acquired
online pharmacy PillPack for nearly $1B.
But it’s not the only tech company expanding into healthcare.
Many are advancing in the space by playing to their strengths:
Apple’s patient-centric vision prioritizes consumers, while
III
Google continues to apply AI to everything from medical
devices to lifestyle management solutions. Microsoft is
building health data management on top of its cloud platform
Azure.growth in Q2’18, jumping 12% YoY.
In our Healthcare 2025
research briefing, we
asked which tech giant
would have the biggest
impact on healthcare.
Even before announcing
any concrete plans,
Amazon came in
second place — just
behind Google.
But as the e-commerce giant moves into the healthcare sector,
many questions arise:
•
What strategies does the company plan to use to enter new
target verticals, especially those with established leaders in
the space?
•
Which companies are most at-risk for an Amazon entrance?
What business models will become obsolete if Amazon
chooses to enter the space?
•
Will Amazon’s advantages — which have worked well in
areas such as retail — translate across healthcare, or is the
company out of its element?
•
Is the timing right? What factors today will enable Amazon
to succeed in healthcare?
•
Using CB Insights data, we dig into how Amazon is
pushing into healthcare, focusing on how the company is
leveraging its current strategy to move into different areas
across the space.
IV
Amazon’s advantage, philosophy, and strategy
• Amazon’s healthcare edge
• The Amazon approach
Amazon the pharmacy
• The pharmacy supply chain and PillPack
• Post-PillPack: Cash pay patients, pharmacy benefits,
and FBA for drug manufacturers?
Amazon, claims management, and health benefits
• Attacking claims management
• From claims manager to benefits manager
Amazon Mediacare/Medicate management
• Why Medicare/Medicaid?
• Prime for groceries and home needs
• Alexa can help with home care
• Clinics coming soon?
Amazon and providers
• The backwards integration strategy
• Alexa and the medical record
• Amazon the B2B (and B2C) supplier
Amazon, the healthcare cloud, and the lab
• The healthcare cloud
• AWS and the lab startup
Conclusion
1
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13
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33
Table of
Contents
V
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VII
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CORPORATE STRATEGY, MICROSOFT
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find emerging trends and
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1
Amazon’s advantage,
philosophy, and strategy
AMAZON’S HEALTHCARE EDGE
As Amazon enters healthcare for the second time, it brings several
new strengths to the table.
Its current scale and reach are larger than ever before. The company
has a direct distribution advantage to over 300M active customers,
100M Prime Members, and approximately 5M sellers on the site,
which could prove useful should it ever develop health solutions for
small businesses.
By teaming up with JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathway, Amazon now
has an additional pool of more than 1.2M employees — diverse in
socioeconomic status, geography, and age, among other factors —
to test its products on before releasing them to the public.
This could be helpful when searching for solutions that work for
both specific use cases (e.g. chronic disease management) and
population demands (e.g. pharmaceutical delivery).
1
Amazon’s ecosystem has also given it more cash to deploy, which
is why it can afford to pursue low-profit initiatives. As stated in the
Amazon-JPM-Berkshire partnership announcement, the companies
want to build an independent healthcare company “free from
profit-making incentives and constraints.”
2
This is doable for Amazon, which can make money by growing
its core businesses like AWS and Prime, and enter into
healthcare willing to eschew profit as its other businesses
become more valuable.
Existing health giants will find it difficult to compete with a
company whose strategy is not dependent on making a profit
in healthcare.
But Amazon has used this strategy for decades.
It has reinvested its revenue into massive infrastructure
build-outs in the logistics and data center spaces, which will
be a significant advantage as it enters healthcare.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), for example, can help handle
the enormous data loads and analysis required in the
healthcare space.
Amazon’s fulfillment centers, supply chain, and acquisition of
Whole Foods has put it within range to distribute healthcare
goods and services quickly.
The last critical advantage Amazon brings to the table is its brand.
Customer experience has been an afterthought in almost every
part of healthcare, and is reflected in the poor NPS scores
(related to customer satisfaction) across the board.
Amazon will likely leverage its obsessive focus on consumer
experience to persuade customers to switch to its offerings.
The question becomes whether Amazon can bring its consumer-
first brand into healthcare faster than existing healthcare
companies can improve.
3
THE AMAZON APPROACH
As Amazon enters new spaces, it follows a strategic playbook:
First, Amazon introduces a customer-friendly product with a
user experience and customer experience superior to that of its
competition. This allows the company to build economies of
scale, network effects, and leverage for negotiating with other
parties (e.g. suppliers).
Then, it invests in upfront fixed costs that allow it to function
better and provide an outsourced version of services to its
customers. We’ve seen this with Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA) and
Amazon Web Services (AWS), which allow companies to use
traditionally expensive services (warehouses, data centers, etc.)
on a rent-to-own basis.
4
By attracting enough users to a platform and offering its own
outsourced services, Amazon can then standardize suppliers’
offerings on its platform. This allows it to create transparent
and competitive markets for buyers and suppliers.
Hiring Atul Gawande to lead its joint healthcare venture with
JPM and Berkshire suggests a continuation of this playbook.
Gawande is focused on using standardization as a means of
scaling up healthcare, especially for relatively commoditized
goods and services.
Lack of standardization and focus on consumer experience
has resulted in an incredibly fragmented, opaque market in
healthcare, which makes the following particularly vulnerable
to Amazon’s entrance:
•
Middlemen that are value extractors and
have large profit margins
•
Companies that focus on formatting or
coordinating information
•
Areas where customer experience has been
an afterthought
•
Companies that have relied on opaque
pricing as a business model
We’ll dive into the healthcare areas that Amazon has the ability
to transform using its strengths in the e-commerce space.
5
Amazon the pharmacy
THE PHARMACY SUPPLY CHAIN AND PILLPACK
The pharmaceutical supply chain in the US is convoluted, filled with
middlemen and confusing business models.
For example, more than three entities are involved in bringing a drug
from manufacturer to patient, and each party takes a percentage of
the profit along the way.
2
Amazon has the opportunity to simplify the supply chain and
improve the experience/cost matters for patients, payers, and
manufacturers.
The company has made significant headway into the pharmaceutical
distribution space with its ~$1B acquisition of mail-order pharmacy
PillPack. With this purchase, Amazon gained a $100M revenue run-
rate business, a built out pharmacy supply, and pharmacy licenses in
all 50 states.
6
PillPack is a good fit for Amazon. The company is loved by
its customers, claiming an NPS score of 80 compared to the
pharmacy average of 26. Customer demand also helped the
company reestablish its partnership with pharmacy benefits
giant Express Scripts after a public falling out. In an email to
its customers, PillPack stated:
“Late last week, PillPack and Express
Scripts reached an agreement that will
allow PillPack to continue to serve you
as an Express Scripts’ customer. This
means your service with PillPack will
not be impacted — we are happy to
remain your pharmacy. We absolutely
could not have done this without you.
Thank you for your stories, letters, and
constant encouragement throughout
this period. Your voice is an important
reminder of why PillPack exists —
we’re here to help you stay healthy.”
This focus on customer experience works well with
Amazon’s ethos.
Additionally, PillPack’s platform for prescription management
known as pharmacyOS shares similarities to Amazon’s
order management and fulfillment services Fulfillment by
Amazon (FBA).
PillPack will handle medication dispensing, monitoring, and
support via pharmacyOS. It also offers these services to
payers, manufacturers, and new companies in the form of a
pharmacy delivery API to plug into. This could integrate well
with Amazon’s existing distribution model.
7
POST-PILLPACK: CASH PAY PATIENTS,
PHARMACY BENEFITS, AND FBA FOR DRUG
MANUFACTURERS?
More than 250M cash pay prescriptions were filled in 2017.
Amazon could capitalize on cash payments by offering
cheaper prices to patients who pay cash for their medications
through PillPack.
This is a good place
to test the product,
especially because cash
pay prices vary greatly by
pharmacy. In some cases,
the cash price might even
be cheaper than what’s
offered through a health
insurer, which could give
insured patients a reason
to check Amazon first.
Beyond cash-paying
patients, Amazon would
need to invest in more
costly parts of the
pharmacy supply chain.
A logical next step would be to complement PillPack’s mail order
pharmacy with a way to fulfill same-day prescriptions. Amazon
could do this by setting up a retail pharmacy and/or pharmacy
distribution node from Whole Foods, or partner with independent
pharmacies in areas where its presence isn’t as strong.
Once Amazon has the pharmacy delivery system set up for
the end patient, it can offer pharmacy benefits to payers that
have traditionally been served by pharmaceutical benefits
managers (PBMs).
8
These benefits have generally included developing a pharmacy
network for patients, negotiating drug rates on behalf of small
health plans and self-insured employers, monitoring anomalies
in prescription fulfillment (e.g. poor medication adherence),
and more.
Employers are looking for alternatives to the existing PBM model.
A National Pharmaceutical Council survey of 88 large employers
found that only 30% understood their contract with their PBM,
and nearly 70% would welcome an alternative to a rebate-driven
business model.
Cigna’s potential acquisition of Express Scripts means small
health plans that compete with Cigna might also be willing to
look at PBM alternatives. Amazon can offer the same functions
traditionally serviced by PBMs to both of these groups, and can
offer those services at near 0% margin since it doesn’t need to
make money on that business line alone.
But to be successful in this venture, it would make sense for
Amazon to work alongside drug manufacturers to negotiate
prices. It can also offer a service to them.
By 2023, every entity in the pharma supply chain will have to be
a part of an interoperable tracking system, and every individual
unit (i.e. a pill bottle) will need to be traceable from start to finish,
as a result of the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA).
9
Amazon has already filed for wholesale pharmacy licenses.
Combined with the licenses it received from the PillPack
acquisition, it only needs a manufacturing license to be able
to transport drugs from end-to-end.
This would allow Amazon to handle products directly from a
manufacturer, and relabel or split them up into different units
as necessary. UPS already seems to be going down this route
with its own manufacturing license.
With all the licenses and logistics pieces in place, Amazon
could effectively operate an outsourced fulfillment system for
drug companies similar to FBA, and handle all of the tracking
requirements that the DSCSA demands.
One major link missing is a cold chain — or temperature-controlled
logistics solution — which Amazon would need in order to
transport any drugs that have specific environmental needs.
Amazon can start with easy-to-transport goods and
eventually move into this area once it’s made its inroads
with drug manufacturers.
10
Amazon, claims management,
and health benefits
ATTACKING CLAIMS MANAGEMENT
Only offering pharmacy benefits to employers would provide a
solution to just one of the healthcare problems they face.
To be more effective, Amazon could become a platform for health
benefits managements as well — which would mean it would need to
delve into the world of claims management and billing.
The current system is made up of multiple steps, manual data entry/
cleaning, and third party middlemen. The process is also slow —
laws are in place to prevent claims processing and reimbursement
from taking more than 30-45 days.
Claims management powers the payments back-end of the entire
healthcare system.
New insurance solutions like Oscar and Collective Health saw the
claims process as outdated and inefficient. As a result, many of the
new tech-enabled carriers have invested significant resources into
building their own claims management systems and infrastructure
as a starting point.
3
11
“When we started Collective Health, we
thought we would partner with a TPA
[Third Party Administrator] to handle
the ‘boring’ part around claims adjudi-
cation — which is a small, but important
part of what we do. We went around the
country to meet with dozens of TPAs, but
we quickly realized the technology at the
core of these businesses wasn’t capable
of powering the transformation in the
healthcare experience for members and
employers we were creating.”
– Rajaie Batniji
CO-FOUNDER OF COLLECTIVE HEALTH
Amazon could potentially offer its own solution to this problem
for payers.
The company has been working on an internal project called Hera,
which involves taking data from electronic medical records (EMRs)
to identify incorrect codes or misdiagnoses.
While there are obvious use cases here for population health
management, this could also be a way for Amazon to start taking
on some of the claims management functions, such as detecting
inaccuracies in submission.
The project is said to have been in development for 3+ years, and
is being pitched to commercial health plans.
12
FROM CLAIMS MANAGER TO BENEFITS
MANAGER
Claims management software could be a white-label solution,
and it also presents a lucrative opportunity for a benefits
management solution for employers.
If Amazon can standardize and structure the payments and
administration back-end of claims, that technology can power
a benefits marketplace where service providers like pharmacies,
wellness companies, PCPs, etc. can outsource the claims
process to Amazon.
Amazon could then provide a platform to employers or small
health plans, creating a distribution avenue for other health
services. This creates an incentive for both sides of the
marketplace to join with Amazon, utilizing back-end services
as well as a front-end platform.
Amazon can also offer self-insured employers a common
product usually purchased in conjunction with benefits
managers: stop-loss insurance. This is a type of insurance
product that self-insured employers tend to take to prevent
against truly catastrophic scenarios.
Berkshire’s specialty insurance subsidiary started offering this
product in 2016, and Amazon could utilize that. This is similar
to Collective Health, which is partnering with Sun Life Financial
to offer stop-loss insurance.
13
Amazon and Medicare/
Medicaid management
WHY MEDICARE/MEDICAID?
With several patient touch points across different settings
(home, grocery store, online, etc.), Amazon could become a
lifestyle manager for the Medicaid and Medicare populations.
There are 52M+ Medicare beneficiaries, 71M+ Medicaid
beneficiaries, and 10M+ dual eligibles (people who have both).
Spending for Medicare and Medicaid topped $1.3T in 2017,
much of which was concentrated in the sickest 10% of patients.
Many patients in this category have chronic diseases or mental
health issues that require day-to-day lifestyle management.
These are groups of the population where Amazon has the most
room to grow its Prime Membership.
Penetration in income levels below $68K per year is
significantly lower than other brackets. Amazon also has
far fewer Prime members above 55, especially compared to
competitors like Walmart.
4
14
Amazon would be entering at a particularly good time because
the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has drafted
proposals to expand coverage for Medicare.
The agency is looking closely at primary care, and looking
to expand its definition to include social determinants like
transportation, diet, home services, etc. It’s also proposing
new reimbursement rules to cover telemedicine-only visits for
Medicare beneficiaries.
Amazon could leverage its position to take advantage of these
changing Medicare rules and bring more people to Prime by
providing attractive incentives.
The company has begun exploring the idea. VP of special proj-
ects Babak Parviz specifically highlighted this as an interest and
took a cross country bus tour to do research. Atul Gawande has
also written about treatment of the elderly, end of life care, and
over utilization of healthcare as a whole in the elderly population.
Amazon was reportedly in talks with AARP earlier this year to
figure out products and solutions for the company’s members.
15
PRIME FOR GROCERIES AND HOME NEEDS
Amazon now offers Medicaid beneficiaries a discounted Prime
membership, though it doesn’t yet extend to Amazon Fresh or
Prime Pantry discounts. This could change in the future — and
we might even see the ability to use SNAP (supplemental
nutrition benefits) on the site directly.
16
The ability to cover food and groceries through Amazon could
actually boost its meal kit business.
Offering disease-specific meal kits would be a huge benefit,
especially for people in locations where access to fresh produce
might be difficult.
Tailored meal kits for dual eligibles can reduce adverse health
events, according to a recent study by Health Affairs. If Amazon
wants to differentiate its meal kit offering, catering it to health
needs for Medicaid and Medicare populations would be one
possible tactic.
17
ALEXA CAN HELP WITH HOME CARE
Amazon can apply similar tactics to the smart home, which every
tech giant is fiercely competing to own. Amazon may have larger
market share, but its competitors are catching up.
One way it can take advantage of its head start and differentiate
itself is by making its smart home technology medically useful.
Amazon’s Echo — its voice-controlled speaker with video
capabilities — is ideal for monitoring purposes, especially at
home; but in order to handle medically relevant data, it must be
HIPAA compliant.
The company posted a job opening for a HIPAA Compliance Lead
as part of the Alexa Information group earlier this year, but the
post has since been removed.
With HIPAA compliance,
the company can go in
several directions.
The Echo could be
used to monitor
adherence and give
notifications about
medications. Amazon
also has patents for
monitoring blood flow
and heart rate through
the camera, and could
expand to fall detection
or gait monitoring.
18
The Echo could also be the hub for services like telemedicine,
digital therapeutics companies, coaches, and more to help
manage Medicaid/Medicare members in their homes.
Amazon is already looking into developing an ecosystem for
third party healthcare applications for Alexa.
It funded the Alexa Diabetes Challenge. The Alexa app platform
has lightweight healthcare apps from institutions like the Mayo
Clinic and Libertana to answer medical Q&A, send alerts in
emergencies, and help communicate with caregivers.
Eventually, Amazon could handle the back-end processes of
HIPAA compliance and voice technology while providing the
distribution and platform for companies through Alexa and
the Echo.
19
CLINICS COMING SOON?
Amazon could also bring healthcare to the physical world and
establish its own clinics.
The company recently hired Martin Levine, former medical
director for Iora Health in Seattle. Iora focuses on creating clinics
and primary care services specifically for Medicare beneficiaries.
A quick way for Amazon to distribute clinics would be to establish
them in Whole Foods, where it already has a retail footprint.
Whole Foods CEO John Mackey talked about this to Bloomberg:
“[Whole Foods CEO, John Mackey’s]
second idea is even more grandiose: a
Whole Foods medical clinic. He says he
was inspired by Rosen Care, an employer
health-care program run by Rosen
Hotels & Resorts in Orlando, which offers
employees an on-site company-owned
medical facility. The clinic has a staff
of 38 health-care practitioners serving
5,300 employees and places an emphasis
on nutrition and preventive medicine,
which company founder Harris Rosen
says has reduced his per-employee
health-care costs to about half the
national average. Mackey met Rosen at
a health-care conference last summer
in Las Vegas, then traveled to Florida to
tour the clinic. He’s considering rolling
out Whole Foods clinics to employees—
and even, perhaps, to customers.”
20
Amazon could test and tweak the clinic concept within Whole
Foods stores before establishing other clinics in higher
Medicare/Medicaid density areas. This would look similar to
companies like Cityblock Health or Oak Street Health.
21
Amazon and providers
THE BACKWARDS INTEGRATION STRATEGY
Amazon is also examining ways it can be useful to existing
physicians, hospitals, and providers.
In the last few decades, healthcare has hired more people
for administrative jobs, many of which involve coordinating
information between different parties and data entry/cleaning.
5
Some point to regulations that require extensive tracking
and noting of services rendered as the catalyst for this
administrative increase.
Instead of investing in modern technology systems as a solution,
many institutions in healthcare prefer to hire more people since
the upfront cost is lower, the implementation is faster, and it’s
easier to adapt their workforce if regulatory requirements change.
Amazon has the opportunity to reduce the burden for users
and build a new back-end for providers. Instead of attempting
to disrupt the existing processes, it might make more sense
for Amazon to pursue a backwards integration strategy,
outlined below.
22
By offering a more intuitive layer on top of the existing system/
process, Amazon can aggregate more users to its user interface
and slowly replace the very manual back-end processes over time.
ALEXA AND THE MEDICAL RECORD
Amazon is reportedly looking into ways data can be pushed into
and pulled from EMRs.
Voice is an increasingly popular interface, and could be
particularly useful in healthcare, as there are lots of hands-free
scenarios.
Hospitals are already exploring the use of voice applications
today.
Premier Health, which has five hospitals and two major health
centers, spent $1.6M to implement voice recognition software
that integrated with Epic, a developer of an EMR system. In the
first year, it estimated that doctors’ clicking fatigue had reduced
and saved them 90 minutes a day. First-year savings for Premier
Health were ~$1.3M thanks to more efficient workflow.
There are several Alexa experiments happening in hospitals
around the country, including Northwell, Mass General, and
Boston’s Children’s Hospital.
23
However, because Alexa is not yet HIPAA-compliant, the
tasks completed with the software are generally limited to
non-identifiable uses, such as checklists for surgeons, disease
and drug information for patients, and hospital information.
If Alexa does become HIPAA-compliant, the use cases could
expand much further.
Most doctors find the EMR process inefficient and time-consuming,
as it requires medical professionals to manually take down
information. Alexa could integrate into EMRs and become a
passive note taker during visits.
Over time, Alexa could help shift Amazon from a middleware that
populates an EMR system into an EMR itself.
24
Several startups are entering the voice space with this strategy
in mind.
Products like Dragon Medical have been around for some time,
while new companies like Suki, Notable, and Saykara have raised
more funding recently and could be potential acquisition targets.
25
AMAZON THE B2B (AND B2C) SUPPLIER
Like the pharmacy, the supply chain is currently convoluted and
filled with middlemen. Manufacturers deal with distributors, who
deal with group purchasing organizations (GPOs) that negotiate
on behalf of hospitals to bring the costs of supplies and technol-
ogy down (though sometimes hospitals negotiate directly).
After labor, the supply chain is hospitals’ second-largest expense,
and it’s expected to grow in the near future.
Amazon already partially services this area: its B2B unit has a
healthcare division that mostly deals with low-risk commodity
products (one reason being that they don’t yet have a cold chain
operation in place).
Because Amazon doesn’t offer everything yet, hospitals can
use existing distributors that can handle all of their needs and
already have a process in place. Many hospitals have stakes in
these GPOs, which further lessens their incentive to switch to a
new system.
26
Amazon is going to have trouble immediately delivering cost
savings to its customers. New York Presbyterian CEO Steven
Corwin mentioned in a recent interview that the company was
unable to deliver better pricing to the hospital.
But the metrics of success are changing. Chris Holt, who leads
Amazon’s B2B supply division, spoke to HealthcareDive about
reducing labor costs, creating a better interface, and building
tech to integrate backwards into existing systems and processes.
Amazon is selling increased efficiency and backwards
integration to get more users onto the system, which can attract
more suppliers that might have better deals, which can then help
Amazon build out its marketplace functionality.
Over time, the company would be able to replace more of the
back-end ordering processes and potentially get better deals
than existing GPOs.
Amazon could also focus on the consumer side of medical
supplies along with its pharmacy strategy. The company could
handle delivery and communication between doctors and
patients post-diagnosis.
27
It recently announced a partnership with Xealth — which is
already integrated into several EMRs and hospitals — to allow
physicians to order medical supplies on behalf of their patients.
Xealth also lets doctors prescribe digital goods like diabetes
management programs and relevant content or regimens for
specific diseases.
28
Amazon, the healthcare
cloud, and the lab
THE HEALTHCARE CLOUD
Amazon’s existing AWS infrastructure is critical to the success
of many of its healthcare initiatives. With more tech giants trying
to expand their cloud platforms, this has become a competitive
space.
Each of the tech giants sees healthcare as a high growth area for
cloud sales due to the vast amount of data being produced, and
the need for high performance computing to make sense of it.
6
Amazon offers several AWS solutions for existing healthcare
companies already, especially in security and compliance.
This has been an especially hot topic, as 2017 saw large scale
hacks of identifiable datasets (which included Social Security
numbers, among other personally identifiable information), and
several hospitals were the target of ransomware attacks.
29
With data safety being an ongoing concern for cloud migration,
these attacks demonstrate the flaws in on-premise storage that
could be a catalyzing moment for healthcare giants.
Amazon can capture more of the healthcare cloud market by
offering specific solutions for the different entities in the space.
Several of the initiatives described above would likely be pow-
ered by AWS, including claims management, patient monitoring,
electronic medical records, and supply chain management
software.
AWS is focusing heavily on is genomics, which is becoming
relevant to payers, providers, researchers, and everyone in
between. Thanks to the falling cost of sequencing and the
increasing amount of screening and usage in clinical settings
(e.g. tumor profiling), the demand for computing power and
storage to analyze these datasets has grown.
30
One way Amazon is doubling down on this space is through
participating in GRAIL‘s $900M+ Series B financing.
GRAIL is attempting to detect cancer earlier by monitoring
circulating tumor DNA in the blood stream. The company gives
Amazon a potential customer that produces a lot of genomic
data and complex analysis tools, and a case study to possibly
acquire more customers.
31
AWS AND THE LAB STARTUP
Amazon to expand its footprint in the lab via AWS. It already
offers several AWS solutions for pharma and biotech companies,
and could expand the services — especially to earlier stage labs
and biotech companies.
Amazon has allowed small companies to outsource the massive
upfront costs associated with running data centers by allowing
companies to rent their usage without having to buy.
Many labs and small biotech companies face large upfront
equipment and lab costs. As companies scale, significant
amounts of their budget go to outsourced services as well.
Amazon could take these costs upon itself and act as a back-
end lab.
This is comparable to how some companies like Transcriptic
and Emerald operate for cell models. Companies like Vium are
creating the building blocks to do this for mouse models.
AWS for labs could allow companies to send in the samples,
run assays, and then receive analyzed and raw data (powered
by AWS). This would allow companies to use equipment only
as needed, especially at the early stages when capital is scarce.
32
Among the benefits, Amazon could also develop relationships
with companies early on and offer more services as they scale
up. This could be its marketplace for AWS services, or it could
expand to a marketplace for other outsourced research services
similar to Science Exchange. By doing this, Amazon could make
it much easier for small labs to get running, identify customers
for its services as it scales up, and become the AWS for biology,
chemistry, etc.
AWS allowed many early-stage tech companies to take off —
Amazon can capture similar value if it helps small labs to start
and grow the same way.
33
Conclusion
Amazon’s potential foray into healthcare has already
caused players in the space to scramble and reevaluate
their core competencies.
While Amazon has barely scratched healthcare’s surface, it
has the potential to upend the space with its e-commerce
expertise. Without the need to make money in healthcare, the
high margin and convoluted parts of the healthcare business
are ripe for disruption.
Amazon’s approach allows other companies to outsource parts
of their businesses that are messy and outside their main focus.
This can happen on multiple fronts, impacting:
•
Payers — Amazon can handle the claims and marketplace
so companies can focus on offering their services.
•
Providers — Amazon can handle documentation into the
EMR or coordinating buying and transporting supplies.
•
Pharma/Biotech — Amazon can run the actual experiments
so researchers can focus on experiment design and
analysis; or Amazon can handle the packaging, tracking, and
transportation for larger drug manufacturers.
As healthcare becomes a deeper quagmire of middlemen and
profit extraction, Amazon is particularly well-positioned to
change the space.
Despite various obstacles, including market leaders, established
processes, and general risk-aversion of buyers to new players,
its entrance will either change how the system is designed or
force existing players to become more competitive.
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