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 Today in Health it, the story is a short, succinct, and brief analysis of Amazon Care based on history. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT at channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. I provide executive coaching for health leaders around technology and it.

If you wanna learn more, check out health lyrics.com. Alright to today's story. I've been a little long-winded lately, especially over the last two days. So this is going to be brief. It's mostly a rehash of some of the content I've done over the last couple weeks with some added color. I read some research from Chili Mark yesterday around Amazon Care and here are the key takeaways.

Today, Amazon Care is surprisingly limited. Initial deployments look to be remote visits and virtual primary care. These are some of the easiest pieces to scale, but offer the least value and potential impact to really dominate the space. Amazon needs to take a cue from Teladoc and other virtual care platforms offering comprehensive remote monitoring and health coaching.

Second point, Amazon is betting consumer experience will be enough to bring in users, whatever else you think of them. The Amazon experience is refined, simple, and popular. If they bring the same ease to healthcare, they might win. Just through that third point, the telehealth bubble is popping, and that's good.

By this summer, vendors offering more than just remote appointments are going to be the only ones able to compete with the Amazon behemoth. I'm gonna humbly disagree with this understanding that we could all be wrong, quite frankly, but I want you to be prepared for what's next. I think there's a basis in history.

There's a lot of points in these three bullet points that I really like. I think the baseline is gonna be about 20% of all visits. That are gonna be telehealth visits. And I believe this analysis would be right if Amazon were going after the consumer. If they were going direct to consumer, I think this analysis would be probably spot on, but I don't think that's where they're going.

So in order to help you to be prepared, let me give this to you as succinctly as I can. The Amazon care model is the model for Amazon Web Services. You have to remember the history of this. They built AWS for their own purposes to scale an online retail business for two months outta the year, November and December.

That's when the buying was off the charts for a online retailer. But the problem was. From January to October, their data center and their compute power and their storage, it was pretty much dormant. They had to bill out a massive capacity for two months, and then they had to figure out what to do with it the rest of the time.

And so they built AWS to meet their own needs first and foremost. But after that was done, they went out and sold the excess capacity. They are in the build phase for Amazon Care right now. They are building it for their own employees and once that is complete, they will have the use case at scale and metrics to show the benefits to large multi-site organizations.

I. It may end there, but I doubt it. They will have something that is of great value for other corporations, a lower cost model for delivering care for a mid to large organization that leverages their technology, their logistics, and their health related assets. This will most likely be an insurance play more than a telehealth play.

This may go direct to consumers at some point. I'm not negating that, but it will not be their first move. They are not a telehealth provider, and this move should not be viewed as a telehealth move. Their move is more like transparent. The new venture by Glen Tolman and team that is targeting the experience and care of employees for mid to large organizations.

That's my 2 cents. What's the So what? The, so what is consumer engagement and capturing consumers is a skill that health systems never had to have. You just built a building and people came to you. You have to have that skill now. We will need to learn how to go into a market, have services that act as a gateway to our health system, have models which align the consumer with the health system for the long term, and provide an experience that will make them never want to leave.

Ask yourself this question. It's a simple question. If you didn't have to, would you still go to your current caregiver? I wouldn't. I would choose an experience where I could text my doctor and someone would respond to me. A place where my physician would be engaged in my health while I am healthy.

Answer my health questions, monitor my vitals through my digital tools, and provide me insights, a health experience that gave me and my family access to the best doctors if I really needed them. If I had a serious issue, think the leading academic medical centers for heart and cancer care if that need ever arises.

Those who are listening to the consumers are building that health experience right now, because that's what we want and that's what a majority of employers are looking for as well. 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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