Out with the old!? - Amazon Acquisition of PillPack
Amazon announced their acquisition of PillPack June 28th. It’s a full service concierge pharmacy with licenses to operate pharmacies in 49 states. This on the heels of their joining with Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan to create a health consortium for servicing each company's large employees base.
So what does it mean? Is this a tectonic shift in healthcare. No, not yet. Healthcare is extremely complex and matrixed. Consider distributers, manufacturers and wholesalers for a moment….. You have contracts and contracts about contracts with established relationships between the parties, some for many years. I don't expect to see the manufacturer/distributor dating pool swell from breakups because of this anymore than seeing a tele-med kiosk at the local wholefoods.
On the other hand, what an excellent test bed of willful subjects for the consortium to test this on. I wouldn't be surprised to see an AWS hosted telemedicine solution for Primary Care sending e-prescriptions over to Pillpack so the employee's medications are waiting on the doorstep after work.
Order, Reorder and reviews. Amazon's retail model works great for bathroom supplies but by in large these aren't heavily regulated products. Its going to take some serious tweaking across significant volume to figure out what works. So I think the old guard of distributors and wholesalers can breath a sigh of relief for now.
Complacency is the enemy of excellence. The person who said this must have worked in retail pharmacy and gotten their supplies in a snap crate morning delivery. Amazon is going to get competent in pharmacy operations with Pillpack. In this space experience wins so expect to see domination on the consumer side and the insulation of multi-year contracts and relationships on the institutional side begin to stress and crack.
In the not too distant future the old guard will find itself an antiquated model of service and delivery that nobody wants. You could say their tool kit serviced the Model A Ford well for many years but its fairly ineffective on the Telsa S Model soon to be rolling off the line. At this point anything they do is too little too late. Expect them to try but their efforts will flounder and 7 years down the road you'll be hard pressed to see the once raging giants logos roaming the interstates or the snap crates in your morning delivery.
Alas! There is hope ...... www.rxspark.com.