Walmart Abandons Health Care Plans, As Retailers Struggle With Their Home-Based Care Strategies

Health care is hard – an idea reinforced this week when Walmart (NYSE: WMT) announced the abandonment of its previously grand health care ambitions. There may be a day when the country’s largest retailers, including Walmart, become major players in home-based care delivery, but today is not that day. And other recent developments suggest tomorrow […]

Amazon Launches Its Next Health Care Venture ‘Amazon Clinic’

Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) is launching its next health care venture. Dubbed Amazon Clinic, it will be a “virtual health service that delivers convenient, affordable care for common conditions.” There is a not a direct home-based care angle, other than that products and services will be offered to consumers at their homes. However, it could create […]

How Home-Based Care Became Table Stakes For CVS, Walgreens, Amazon

Last December, I wrote about the “retail giants ready to disrupt home-based care.” Though confident in my hypothesis that these larger companies – CVS Health (NYSE: CVS), Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), Walgreens Boots Alliance (Nasdaq: WBA) and Walmart (NYSE: WMT) – were going to enter further into the home-based care space, I was not under the […]

Why Amazon Is Shutting Down Amazon Care

When news hit Wednesday that Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) was shutting down its virtual and at-home care business, Amazon Care, there was reasonably some confusion among the health care industry at large. The shutting down of Amazon Care is a failure if viewed in a vacuum. Amazon was unable to disrupt the health care industry – […]

Amazon Is Shutting Down The Virtual- And Home-Focused ‘Amazon Care’

Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) is shutting down Amazon Care, the virtual and in-home care service that it first began rolling out to its own employees in 2019. Once considered the brand that would either help along or significantly disrupt the home-based care space, Amazon Care had initially planned to roll its services out to 20 additional […]

Amazon Agrees to Buy Primary Care Company One Medical for $3.9B

Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) announced plans on Thursday to acquire the primary care provider One Medical (Nasdaq: ONEM) for a price tag of $3.9 billion.  Once the acquisition closes, it will give Amazon a large primary care capability to potentially pair with its growing home-based care business, Amazon Care. Originally launched in 2019 as part of […]

Amazon Expanding Virtual Care Platform Nationwide, Bringing In-Person Services to 20 New Cities

Amazon’s (Nasdaq: AMZN) in-home care arm is on the move, expanding to more than 20 new cities while rolling out even more care options. Launched in 2019 as part of a pilot with Amazon’s Seattle-based employees, the Amazon Care model uses virtual and in-person visits from medical professionals to deliver “health care to customers when […]

CVS Health Executive: ‘Underestimate Amazon at One’s Peril’

The retail giants are getting — either indirectly or directly — into home-based care. That matters, because if they didn’t firmly believe in it, they wouldn’t be paying any mind to it at all. “We’re a $270 billion company. … You have to pick what you’re going to spend your time on,” Alan Lotvin, the […]