Amazon Care is closing

Amazon Care has half a dozen corporate clients including Hilton, Silicon Labs, Precor and Amazon-owned Whole Foods. One of them said that workers were told that the service would be closed because these customers did not see the value of the service. And dozens of employees will lose their jobs at the end of the year, according to parents.

Amazon spokeswoman Christina Smith confirmed the decision and published a note announcing it with the Washington Post.

“This decision was not taken lightly and only became clear after several months of careful consideration,” Neil Lindsay, Amazon’s senior vice president of health, said in an email to employees. “Although our registered members liked many aspects of Amazon Care, it is not a complete enough offering for the large enterprise customers we were targeting, and it won’t work in the long run.”

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.

Sometimes Amazon’s health ambitions conflict with health best practices

The decision to close Amazon Care comes as a surprise given Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s commitment to expanding healthcare investments in Amazon. It comes on the heels of Amazon’s $3.9 billion acquisition of healthcare startup One Medical last month, a deal that could still face antitrust scrutiny by the Federal Trade Commission.

In his 2021 letter to shareholders, Jassy named Amazon Care as an example of the “type of iterative innovation” that is “pervasive across every team at Amazon.”

Amazon Care is currently available in nearly all of the country, and was supposed to expand to 20 cities for home care provided by mobile health nurses by the end of this year. Originally a project for Amazon’s top secret Grand Challenge incubator, former service employees were under pressure to expand quickly. Because Amazon can’t directly hire doctors who treat its employees, care is provided by nurses and doctors who work for a company called Care Medical, some of whom said Amazon is putting growth before patient safety, The Post reported last week.

In his email, Lindsey said that Amazon Care employees could be assigned to other jobs within Amazon, and that the company would “support employees looking for jobs outside the company.”