I hear, and personally experience instances where the insurance company does not understand (or at least can explain to us…
Morning Headlines 3/18/21
Amazon is expanding Amazon Care telehealth service nationally for its employees and other companies
Amazon plans to expand Amazon Care, its virtual and house call care service, to employees in all 50 states and other employers.
San Francisco-based analytics company Clarify Health raises $115 million, bringing its total funding to $178 million.
Unite Us Announces It Has Raised $150M to Scale Nationwide Social Care Infrastructure
Care and social services coordination software company Unite Us reaches unicorn status with a $150 million Series C funding round.
Viz.ai Raises $71 Million Series C Round Led by Scale Venture Partners and Insight Partners
Viz.ai, developer of AI-powered care coordination software for stroke patients, raises $71 million.
Harmonize Health, which offers remote patient monitoring, chronic care management, and outcomes tracking for elderly and high-risk patients, raises $10 million in a Series A funding round.
I am seeing a lot of hyper excited takes on social media on Amazon’s virtual care move but really curious to find out what do readers of HISTalk and Mr. HISTalk himself think! Folks here usually offer more measured views tempered by a healthy dose of cynicism from their deep healthcare experience.
Well from Amazon’s announcement, the service and sales model is basically teladoc. I think the big question is if Amazon expects the venture to ever make money or just make financial sense for their employment expenses? I think it will be like Walmart where they initially focused on their own employees, that didn’t work too well so they tried to pivot to selling via in store clinics which didn’t work so they gave up and outsourced it to like villagermd or something. The small question is what if your employer bought an Amazon employee service and that service treated you in the same way Amazon treats its warehouse workers? As an employee I would never use the service again. Are they going to segment the service? The only thing we know is that they for sure aren’t going to treat their own employees with respect.