CEO Andy Jassy shares 2 ways Amazon is transforming health care

During a recent Q&A with shareholders, CEO Andy Jassy discussed how Amazon is working to make significant and meaningful changes to the health care experience for customers. He focused on two health care offerings that are contributing to Amazon’s mission of making customers' lives easier and better: subscriptions to One Medical, which is $9 a month or $99 a year for Prime members, and same-day delivery of prescription medications with Amazon Pharmacy, which Amazon plans to expand this year.

Here's how Jassy said Amazon is helping to transform the health care experience:

We have a mission across every one of our businesses at Amazon to make customers' lives easier and better, every day—and that is absolutely true in the health care space … I’ll just stick with the United States to begin with.

They're not going to believe that we used to have to make a doctor's appointment many weeks in advance, drive 20 minutes to the doctor, park the car, wait in the waiting room for 20 minutes, finally get into an exam room, and wait for 15 minutes for a doctor. The doctor came in for five minutes, then you had to leave the doctor's office and drive 20 minutes to the drug store to pick up whatever your medicine was. People are not going to believe that was the experience, and that is going to very significantly change. And we're trying to be a meaningful part of changing that.

And so you can see that in a couple different areas. If you look at our Amazon One Medical offering, now you have a simple-but-powerful app that has all your medical information in one place. You can talk to medical practitioners via chat or video conference. You can pay by the visit for acute issues, or you can get a subscription for chronic issues or primary care to see a primary care physician and a consistent team.

And when you have that One Medical subscription, you can obviously interact and chat or video conference, but you can also visit one of our many physical clinics in metropolitan areas. You can get appointments, same day or next day, and we also have relationships in every city in which we reside with specialists where you can get in for referrals and appointments on their calendar in very short order. Customers love this experience.

I think that what you see is, instead of doctors coming in and speaking with you for five minutes, they spend considerably more time with their patients, in part because that's the way that we've set up the customer experience, because we know patients want to be able to have time to ask medical practitioners questions.

We've also been inventing on the technology side, where we've used our AWS HealthScribe AI Service to do a lot of the transcription for doctors of summaries so they don't have to spend so much time with their paperwork. You can get a One Medical subscription for $9 a month or $99 a year as a Prime customer. So we're very excited about how this is continuing to grow.

And then on the pharmacy side, I think the team has built a truly outstanding customer experience, and we're hearing that feedback over and over from customers and seeing them vote with their purchases. We offer same-day delivery of prescriptions now to eight cities across the United States, including Los Angeles and New York City, with more coming this year. We've built programs like RxPass, which, for $5 a month for Prime members, gives our Prime members unlimited access to 60 common medications with very fast delivery and 24/7 pharmacy support. We are changing this customer experience that people have had to endure on the pharmacy side for a really long time. We're changing it very significantly. I really encourage you to check it out if you haven't. It's a very different experience from the physical pharmacy experience. It's growing very well.

I'm excited about what we're doing here, but I would also tell you that we have so much more that we're going to deliver for customers over the next couple of years. We're really working to try to help change this customer experience.

Next, read Jassy’s recent letter to shareholders.