Failing Fast to Heal Healthcare

Written by Peter Rooney , MRM for Health EVP, Managing Director

Amazon’s pivot to a?“click-and-mortar" hybrid health model reinforces their commitment and need to create the optimal?connected health experience

On the heels of Amazon’s recent announcement that it would shut down telehealth service Amazon Cares, debate and skepticism are raging. Headlines and pundits are declaring that “health is too hard for big tech,” it's “not as easy as it seems” and this is “yet another miss.” Or they’ve dubbed the tech giant’s move “a major retreat in its efforts to break into the healthcare space."

As I see it, nothing could be further from the truth.

Rather than being a step back, Amazon’s decision is a major move forward. Indeed, the company is daring to do what health and pharma have failed to do for decades—heal healthcare. They are making the wise choice to fail fast, learn, pivot quickly and invest in innovations that improve the overall healthcare experience.

At its core, healthcare is fragmented. Overall, it is a slow and costly model with a terrible experience that doesn’t produce great results or include all those who need it.?

As we discussed in our recent global study “The Truth About Our Relationships with Health ,” the promise of technology has been looming large for the past two decades with tech and data advances, yet the reality of the current landscape is that it is still a fragmented system of disconnected resources, siloed data, and artificial intelligence that are still falling short of expectations.

My favorite example of this is telehealth. Today’s telehealth is truly nothing more than a Zoom call with a healthcare professional. It might be faster and easier, but you'll likely meet with someone who isn't your primary physician, in the absence of any type of diagnostic tools, and this person will likely not have access to your medical records.?

It’s not even close to a true office visit.

And Amazon realized this. They acknowledged that Amazon Cares ultimately was “not a complete enough offering” and that it "wasn’t going to work long-term.”

The stratospheric rise of telehealth during COVID was because we had no other options. A quick scan of?Teladoc stock ?is case in point: It skyrocketed during the heights of the pandemic’s lockdowns and today is back to baseline.

Healing healthcare is only going to happen when we create more connected and personalized health experiences. The answer lies in a new hybrid health model that connects both the live and virtual, integrating cutting-edge technologies like Web3 and AI, into a more fully integrated experience extending from the exam room to the living room.

To quote Steve Jobs, “You have to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology." This new approach will require marketers, health agencies, data providers and technology partners to obsess over the experience and bring together more integrated solutions that result in a sum greater than its parts.

And it will require partnerships that harness massive amounts of health data to gain insight and intelligence to inform more personalized, more predicative, and more behavioral approaches to improving health—for all. Indeed, as has been?reported , in the case of Amazon, “One Medical was the better, more advanced primary care business, and with reports of Amazon now bidding on Signify Health, the internet retail giant seems to be more in a buy than build mood in health care.”

There never has been a more exciting time to be in healthcare and partner with innovators hyper-focused on disrupting a system and creating better health experiences.

Jobs’ predecessor, Henry Ford, also had a few words to say that speak to this truth: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Buckle up. This ride is just getting started.