Dive Brief:
- Amazon’s One Medical will serve as primary care provider for employers who participate in Health Transformation Alliance, the partners announced Wednesday.
- The HTA is a cooperative of nearly 60 employers — including companies like Coca-Cola, American Express, Marriott, Boeing and JPMorgan — that aims to combine resources and develop value-based care tools to lower the cost of employees’ care.
- The partnership marks the latest deal for the primary care chain, which also announced this week it would stand up new clinics in New Jersey through a partnership with Hackensack Meridian Health.
Dive Insight:
HTA’s members manage care for more than 4 million lives with a collective annual healthcare spend of $27 billion, according to the employer group. The partnership with One Medical will include digital health tools and primary care services for member companies, “addressing the inefficiencies and costs that plague our system,” HTA CEO Robert Andrews said in a statement.
The announcement comes as health costs are expected to rise next year for employers, who provide insurance coverage for most people in the U.S.
As costs rise, many employers have raised concerns about their workers’ views of the benefit, with 58% of employers noting in a recent KFF survey their employees had a moderate or high level of concern about affordability of cost sharing.
Amazon, which completed its $3.9 billion purchase of One Medical early this year, is no stranger to the employer market.
The tech and retail giant partnered with J.P. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway in 2018 on a venture that aimed to tackle companies’ growing healthcare cost burden for their workers. But the endeavor, called Haven, shut down after three years.
Amazon’s hybrid care service for employers, Amazon Care, also recently stopped operating. Leadership determined the product wasn’t “a complete enough offering” for large enterprise customers.
One Medical, which runs over 200 clinics in more than 20 markets across the U.S., provides its own employer product too. It works with more than 8,500 companies to offer the service as an employee health benefit, according to the latest announcement.
Amazon has also taken steps to better integrate One Medical with its core e-commerce offerings, discounting the price of the primary care network to $9 a month for users who subscribe to Prime.
