UCLA’s Dr. Jesse Mills, thinks improvements to healthcare are on the way.

LOS ANGELES, CA, UNITED STATES, September 9, 2022 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The healthcare industry isn’t known for convenience. Long waits in doctor’s offices, expensive prescriptions, and procedures, and phone tag with providers (If they even bother returning your call.) all paint a bleak picture that makes getting sick even more miserable.

For Amazon, all those failures of the healthcare system are a huge opportunity. Can the tech giant succeed where others have failed?

The Positives

In July, Amazon acquired One Medical, a membership-based primary care service, for $3.9B. But its foray into health care dates further back:

· In 2018, Amazon acquired the prescription delivery service PillPack.

· In 2019, it launched the employee telehealth service Amazon Care. It boasts ~40k members across several customers, including TrueBlue and Hilton.

With One Medical, Amazon will reach 736k new health care members and lend One Medical the infrastructure it needs to scale — something Amazon does pretty well.

“Clearly the US health system is at an inflection point. The pandemic put brick and mortar clinics in catch-up mode to be able to offer telehealth visits to patients--a platform digital health providers had already conquered years ago,” says Dr. Jesse Mills.

The Negatives

According to the Washington Post, several nurses who worked for Amazon Care have complained about the company’s “fast and frugal” approach to health care, which resulted in faulty equipment, buggy software, and questionable care.

No employee wants to feel like they’re just a cog in a machine. One certainly doesn’t want their healthcare provider to just go through the motions when they aren’t allowed to see you as a human being with unique needs. A patient is not just a package being transferred from A to B.

Dr. Jesse Mills: “There are a lot of problems with digital health: lack of physical exam, lack of transmitting empathy effectively, lack of immediate access to laboratory work, imaging and procedures, to name a few. However, there is a huge opportunity for a hybrid model where some care can be efficiently delivered via telehealth and some in person. What this means for the system is massive cost savings and the opportunity to help people outside of a drivable radius. The savings in gas, time off work, parking, childcare, bus fare, and associated costs with in-person visits is a big plus for patients.”

The Customers

Customers like what Amazon does for them, giving the service an average satisfaction rating of 4.7 out of 5.

Another positive aspect of Amazon’s foray into the healthcare space is competition. Everyone benefits when product and service providers are driven to better pricing and services by the need to compete in the marketplace.

In setting new expectations for speed and convenience, Amazon can bring the “Prime Effect” to health care, forcing other providers to catch up.

Dr. Jesse Mills says, “Physician practices can cut overhead which is, of course, a slippery slope. Fewer office visits mean less real estate, and fewer employees to check patients in and turn over rooms. Amazon owns the digital sphere and the computational science that allows their system to dominate the digital world. Cogging in a doctor to the machine is not that difficult and likely will be the way of the future for other companies as well. There is nostalgia at play with losing the doctor-patient handshake, to be sure but, as much as I miss browsing bookstores, smelling the ink and paper, I haven't purchased a book, even my own, in a bookstore in the last few years.”

You can find Jesse Mills, MD mainly at his primary office location in Santa Monica, listed below:

Santa Monica Urology
1260 15th Street
Suite 1200
Santa Monica, California 90404
Phone: 310-794-7700
Fax: 310-394-5302

https://www.uclahealth.org/providers/jesse-mills

Jaaron Jennings
Boundless Media Inc.
+1 951-870-0099
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