Amazon Health Services SVP Neil Lindsay

Digital Health

Amazon Launches RxPass For Generic Drugs

The biggest digital health news of the week was Amazon’s new RxPass offering, which sparked a ton of conversation around the tech-giant’s overall strategy and the direction of retail healthcare.

The RxPass details seem to have already been posted on every news site under the sun, but here they are in case you missed them:

• Consumers can choose from a list of 53 generic medications for over 80 common conditions such as hypertension, anxiety, or hair loss, then have ALL of them filled for a total of $5/month, including delivery. Here’s the full list.

• What’s the catch? You need to be a Prime member ($139/year), it’s OOP only (even Medicaid/Medicare coverage is a no-go), and residents of California, Texas, and a handful of other states need not apply… yet.

For patients taking multiple medications, RxPass has the potential to be an absolute game changer. It also seems like a great way to enroll new Prime members that don’t want to watch Jack Ryan or listen to Amazon Music, especially seniors.

• Only a few other companies have the logistical prowess to put something similar together, such as Walmart’s generic drug service ($4/month PER medication), CVS and Walgreens’ prescription programs, and Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company’s transparency-first approach.

• What these competitors don’t have is 170M US Prime members and a website that averages two billion monthly visitors. Walmart’s probably the closest, and it last reported having about 12M Walmart+ members.

The Takeaway

Amazon’s RxPass launch is the latest link in a chain of healthcare moves that now looks something like this if you cut out the noise form Alexa / Whole Foods / Halo:

• PillPack (2018) -> Amazon Pharmacy (2020) -> Haven (RIP) -> Amazon Care (RIP) -> Amazon Clinic (2022) -> One Medical (2022) -> RxPass (2023)

If anything, RxPass reaffirms Amazon’s commitment to compete in the healthcare arena through its core competencies, which isn’t exactly great news for D2C digital health startups or mail-order pill mills. The good news is that if anyone’s going to come out on top of all the competition, it’ll probably be the consumer.

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The Wire

• CVS Virtual Primary Care: Another big piece of retail healthcare news that got overshadowed by the RxPass roll out was CVS Health’s official launch of its new Virtual Primary Care service. The program is now available to Aetna members nationwide and provides access to primary care, on-demand care, and mental health visits, with in-person follow-ups accessible at any MinuteClinic. If reading that gave you déjà vu, we did a full overview of the original announcement all the way back in May of last year.

• Qualtrics Healthcare Experience Trends: Qualtrics’ 2023 Healthcare Experience Trends report showed that healthcare had the lowest employee satisfaction level out of 27 industries, with only 50% of employees feeling fairly compensated and 39% considering leaving the profession. The survey of 3k healthcare workers and 9k consumers also found that a large majority of patients trust hospitals (79%), but many feel that providers and payors need to do a better job of listening to them (61%, 69%).

• Ro Body Program: Ro unveiled a new weight loss program dubbed the Ro Body Program, which combines increasingly popular GLP-1 medications with at-home diagnostic testing and one-on-one coaching from nurses. The Ro Body Program expands Ro’s services beyond its current portfolio (Mental Health, Skin Care, Fertility, Male Health) with comprehensive obesity care that uses at-home metabolic testing to help develop personalized treatment plans that can be tailored to individual weight loss goals.

• Dollar General Mobile Clinics: Last but not least out of this week’s retail healthcare press mill was Dollar General’s new partnership with medical transportation provider DocGo to pilot mobile clinics at three of its Tennessee locations. The clinics will live under the DG Wellbeing brand and offer basic services and lab testing out of healthcare’s final frontier – Dollar General parking lots. The pilot might expand to additional stores depending on customer response, with DG noting that the program could greatly improve access to rural healthcare due to the fact that 65% of its 19k stores are located in pharmacy deserts. 

• Higher Volume, Better Outcomes: Clarify Health Institute’s latest research revealed that high-volume orthopedic surgeons deliver better patient outcomes (high-volume was over 100 surgeries between 2017 and 2020, low-volume was less than 10 surgeries). Among 178k orthopedic procedures from 23.5k providers (a huge sample accounting for 14% of all hip and knee replacements in the US), high-volume surgeons saw fewer post-acute inpatient readmissions at 7 and 60 days (37-51% lower than low-volume surgeons), as well as lower costs for total hip and knee replacements ($2.8k, $1.5k).

• Intermountain Rebranding: Intermountain Healthcare is literally taking the “care” out of “healthcare” as part of a large rebranding designed to reflect its mission of keeping people healthy beyond the traditional healthcare setting. The 33-hospital system is now officially named Intermountain Health, with a squiggly new red and purple logo that apparently represents a commitment to better experiences.

• Kyruus + Bellin: Provider data management company Kyruus just crossed a major milestone for any digital health startup by adding Bellin Health as its 100th health system customer. Wisconsin-based Bellin recently leveraged the Kyruus ProviderMatch platform to launch a new digital patient access experience on its website, which reportedly led to “an immediate increase in online self-scheduling appointments.”

• Cardiac Arrests During Sports: Truveta performed a timely analysis of its patient dataset following the on-field collapse of Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin, finding that about 9.92 cardiac arrests occur for every 100k sports injuries that result in a hospital visit. The incidents were most often associated with basketball, with fewer related to football, baseball, and soccer. Although less than one cardiac arrest occurred for every 10k injuries since 2016, it’s worth noting that Truveta only reported on injuries that led to ED or inpatient encounters. 

• Included Expands LGBTQ+ Care: Included Health is teaming up with Tufts Health Plan and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care to expand access to comprehensive LGBTQ+ care for both health plans’ members. The collaboration launched with Tufts at the beginning of 2023 (HPHC’s roll out is slated for later this year), allowing commercial members to access Included’s LGBTQ+ services such as gender affirming care, community support, and benefit navigation.

• Telehealth Lowers Cancer Costs: Telehealth appointments are associated with decreased travel and time costs for cancer patients, according to new research from Moffitt Cancer Center. Between April 2020 and June 2021, MCC saw 11.6k of its patients (25.4k telehealth visits) lower their care expenses by an average $186, with telehealth returning an estimated total of $1.2M in lost productivity due to driving time, and $467k in lost productivity due to visit time.

• What Happened to Amwell & Talkspace? It’s been over two months since it was reported that Amwell was in “late stage” discussions to acquire Talkspace for $1.50 per share or $200M total, and both companies have been radio-silent since then. Talkspace is currently trading at $0.75/share, which more-or-less means that the market thinks this has about a 50% chance to go through. Has anyone seen any updates on this? Hit reply and let us know!

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