Amazon has long ceased to be an e-commerce and nothing more. The Internet sales giant has also moved into physical stores with the opening of stores and the purchase of others, it has also become last-mile supermarkets, it is a streaming service, music, books, digital services for companies and , now also, a giant of telemedicine. Behind all of this? A large amount of data that makes Amazon a monster that knows everything.
In this way, Amazon has just announce the acquisition of One Medical for a whopping $3.9 billion. It is, historically, the third largest operation carried out by the company founded by Jeff Bezos. Just behind Whole Foods – their entry into physical supermarkets – of 13.7 billion and after MGM – which makes them the kings of cinema – of 8.45 billion dollars.
With One Medical, Amazon becomes one of the leaders in the telemedicine sector in the United States. And it accompanies the other movements that the technology company has been making to enter a highly profitable sector. The company launched Amazon Pharmacy in 2020, a kind of online pharmacy to order prescription drugs. It also adds Amazon Care, its own telemedicine service recently launched and expanded throughout the country as a form of private primary care.
The problem of Big Tech and Amazon entering telemedicine
The new telemedicine and primary care service that Amazon has acquired it does not remain in a simple altruistic act for the health of its users. The service, which works like a subscription to Prime Video, has a clear objective behind it. Together with its online pharmacy system, added to the ecosystem in the Amazon Web Service cloud, the objective is collect trends and patient data. In this way, the detection of treatments or suggestions for them reaches a higher point.
In any case, there are already doubts about the acquisition of One Medical, which still has to be approved by the relevant authorities. This entry in style of Amazon in the world of telemedicine and health conflicts with one of the speeches that Joe Biden has held since the beginning of his candidacy: the monopoly and power that the big tech companies had been accumulating –without control– for years.
In fact, the agreement is already pointed out as a challenge for the country’s Department of Justice to prevent Amazon, in this case, from having control of the medical sector. Something that already happened with Facebook after its dominant position in the online advertising market or platforms through Instagram or WhatsApp. Also Microsoft, whom he classified as lobbyists. The same with Google or Apple. A position that the United States has been holding for some years and that brings them closer to one of their biggest rivals. China has also been exercising tight control over its big technology companies and the power that, after many years, they have been accumulating far from the power of the One Party.
So much power, even, as to exert pressure on government decisions at will and benefit. In fact, One Medical has already been singled out for skipping some rules in the sector: offering vaccines against Covid-19 to people who were not entitled to them due to age or pathology or charging for them when they were always free.
In Spain, in business it is a thing of telcos
The irruption of technology in the world of telemedicine It’s not just a US thing and their privacy policies. It’s not just an Amazon issue, either. For some time now, private online primary care services have been the trend. Especially since the arrival of the Coronavirus pandemic. On the one hand, care in pharmacies is something that the sector has been claiming for some time with its own applications and delivery systems. Amazon has absorbed a large part of the business that corresponded to these establishments in the so-called parapharmacy. In addition, they found another rival in Glovo with their collection of prescription drugs for users.
As for the purest telemedicine, in Spain, in the absence of great technology companies such as Google or Amazon, the role has fallen to the telcos. Fiber and 5G was not enough for a business that has been trying to reinvent itself for some time. And that, although profitable and essential, its innovation has been limited by high infrastructure costs. The telco sector saw the opportunity in the eHealth business. With highly saturated public attention, it was a way to take advantage of the peak of business. In fact, the latest surveys show that the opinion of Spaniards about primary care has dropped points and 1 in 4 citizens would first go to a private center instead of a public one. From the collapse of the public, comes the moment of the private.
It is also an interesting business due to its link to the platforms and to one of the gold ones of the coming years: the data. Health information, provided by the digitization of data, is one of the most interesting points for the ecosystem.
In this way, and in addition to private insurance that has been growing for years, there is no telco without its health service. Telefónica with its Movistar Salud, Orange with Orange Salud and MásMóvil with DoctorGo. All telemedicine services available in its ecosystem of products.