If 2022 was about Amazon making moves in healthcare, 2023 has been about the big tech firm establishing its place.
With a noticeably bigger presence at this year’s HLTH conference compared with last year’s show, Amazon has a clear mission in healthcare, said Vice President of Health Services Neil Lindsay. The longtime Amazon veteran was tapped in December 2021 to oversee all of its health efforts. Since then, the company has acquired primary care provider One Medical, launched Amazon Clinic and established a generic medication discount program through its Amazon Pharmacy business.
“It’s taken us some time to make sure we are building the right foundation,” Lindsay said.
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Lindsay spoke with Modern Healthcare about its past failures in the industry, how AI fits into its strategy and working within a heavily regulated industry. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How do you respond to skeptics who don’t believe Amazon can disrupt healthcare based on some of its past failures, such as Haven?
We don’t view those as missteps. At Amazon, it's just experimentation and trying things. You go into a jungle and it either opens up or it doesn't, but you try different paths. There’s no land rush here. There is so much opportunity to make a difference in this industry.
We’ve been learning from those experiences and working out how to make a difference. And I think we're really on a great path right now with this idea that we can make it easier to get care, easy to get medications, and then ultimately easy to find the things you need to get well. There's obviously a lot of heavy, heavy lifting, but it's also a straightforward strategy. People expect that we're going to come in and reinvent healthcare. We don't think that. We don’t have a magic wand. We’re trying to find a few [areas] to make a difference in and make things a little bit easier.
Where does AI fit into your three areas of concentration: One Medical, pharmacy and Amazon Clinic?
When we think about AI, it’s about simplifying the back end. In pharmacy processing and chasing prescriptions, there are still too many phones and faxes in healthcare. You don’t need AI for that kind of thing, you just need basic algorithms. We use AI to give an estimated price on medications even before we know your insurance information. That machine learning is basically giving a range that you can anticipate what the price is likely to be.
AI is also really important in making the providers’ experience better. I think that's one of the most critical areas that we should all be focused on using AI. The human moment between the provider and the patient is really important. Providers are spending all their time trying to go through records and find more [information] about a patient's history. [AI] can help [clinicians] understand what are really the core things that you need to know about this patient. AI will be able to simplify that process.
How do you deal with the heavily regulated nature of healthcare delivery?
There’s a lot of heavy lifting to make sure we [recognize] that it’s not just shipping a product. You’re enabling a provider to support a patient. The standards of care that you have to apply are really important. We often say we have to go as fast as possible, but as slow as necessary. Slow as necessary is particularly relevant in healthcare.
In other areas, you might experiment more. There are one-way doors and two-way doors. There are more one-way doors in healthcare. You have to do it right. That's true everywhere, of course, but when you're dealing with someone's health, you have to care a great deal about it. You have to do the work to make sure that you are complying as necessary and appropriately. We care about more than just the regulations. We care about the intention. It’s not a barrier [to innovation], it’s just work.
