Amazon is shutting down Amazon Care, its telehealth service launched just three years ago

In July, we wrote about Amazon after the retail giant acquired primary health care provider One Medical for about $3.9 billion in cash as part of its plans to make inroads into the $3 trillion healthcare industry. Just a month later, it now appears the retail behemoth might be making a major retreat in its efforts to break into the health care space.

Today, Amazon announced it’s shutting down Amazon Care, a telehealth service the company founded three years ago. According to an internal memo sent to employees on Wednesday, the company said it “will no longer offer Amazon Care after December 31, 2022.”

In a company email, Amazon Health Services lead Neil Lindsay announced Wednesday that the e-commerce giant decided to make the move after determining it wasn’t “the right long-term solution for our enterprise customers,”

“We are working on an important, missionary opportunity. Our vision is to make it easier for people to access the health care products and services they need to get and stay healthy. We know accomplishing this won’t be easy or fast, but we believe it matters,” Lindsay wrote.

He also added, “One of the ways we’ve worked towards this vision for the past several years has been with our urgent and primary care service offering, Amazon Care. During that time, we’ve gathered and listened to extensive feedback from our enterprise customers and their employees, and evolved the service to continuously improve the experience for customers. However, despite these efforts, we’ve determined that Amazon Care isn’t the right long-term solution for our enterprise customers, and have decided that we will no longer offer Amazon Care after December 31, 2022.”

Amazon Care was launched in 2019 as a pilot program for employees in and around the company’s Seattle headquarters. The plan’s care team is made up of doctors, nurse practitioners, and registered nurses.

According to its website, Amazon Care offers services including everyday health, urgent care, and virtual urgent care visits, as well as free telehealth consults and in-home visits for a fee from nurses for testing and vaccinations, travel consultations, and general health questions.

Telehealth services experienced a boom during the covid pandemic when most people were unable to leave their homes. The demand has since declined as more patients opted for in-person doctor visits.

Below’s the entire memo Amazon sent to employees. 

“Health Services team,

We are working on an important, missionary opportunity. Our vision is to make it easier for people to access the health care products and services they need to get and stay healthy. We know accomplishing this won’t be easy or fast, but we believe it matters.

One of the ways we’ve worked towards this vision for the past several years has been with our urgent and primary care service offering, Amazon Care. During that time, we’ve gathered and listened to extensive feedback from our enterprise customers and their employees, and evolved the service to continuously improve the experience for customers. However, despite these efforts, we’ve determined that Amazon Care isn’t the right long-term solution for our enterprise customers, and have decided that we will no longer offer Amazon Care after December 31, 2022.

This decision wasn’t made lightly and only became clear after many months of careful consideration. Although our enrolled members have loved many aspects of Amazon Care, it is not a complete enough offering for the large enterprise customers we have been targeting, and wasn’t going to work long-term.

Our work building Amazon Care has deepened our understanding of what’s needed long-term to deliver meaningful health care solutions for enterprise and individual customers. You’ve heard me say it before, but I believe the health care space is ripe for reinvention, and our efforts to help improve the health care experience can have an immensely positive impact on our quality of life and health outcomes. However, none of these reasons make this decision any easier for the teams that have helped to build Amazon Care, or for the customers our Care team serves.

Our priority right now is to support you, regardless of the path you take. Many Care employees will have an opportunity to join other parts of the Health Services organization or other teams at Amazon — which we’ll be discussing with many of you shortly — and we’ll also support employees looking for roles outside of the company.

To the Amazon Care and Care Medical teams, thank you for all of your hard work over these last several years. You should be very proud of what this team has been able to accomplish in a short period of time. I am also thankful to our members and business customers for entrusting us with their care; this is not a responsibility we take lightly. As we take our learnings from Amazon Care, we will continue to invent, learn from our customers and industry partners, and hold ourselves to the highest standards as we further help reimagine the future of health care.

Sincerely,

Neil”