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Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Team Up to Disrupt Health Care
Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase announced on Tuesday that they would form an independent health care company to serve their employees in the United States. The three companies provided few details about the new entity, other than saying it would initially focus on technology to provide simplified, high-quality health care for their employees and their families, and at a reasonable cost. They said the initiative, which is in the early planning stages, would be a long-term effort "free from profit-making incentives and constraints."
The partnership brings together three of the country's most influential companies to try to improve a system that other companies have tried and failed to change: Amazon, the largest online retailer in the world; Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company led by the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett; and JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States by assets.
Various health insurance and pharmacy companies were hit by the news:
The move sent shares of health-care stocks falling in early trading. Express Scripts Holding Co. and CVS Health Corp., which manage pharmacy benefits, slumped 6.7 percent and 5.5 percent, respectively. Health insurers Cigna Corp. and Anthem Inc. also dropped. The health-care industry has been nervously eyeing the prospect of competition from Amazon for months. While the new company created by Amazon, Berkshire and JPMorgan would be for their U.S. staff only, this is the first big move by Amazon into the industry. The new collaboration could pressure profits for middlemen in the U.S. health-care supply chain.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by goodie on Tuesday January 30 2018, @10:01PM (2 children)
In a few years (if not less), Amazon will launch AHS (Amazon Health Services), a healthcare system that costs less money because it relies heavily on machines to do a lot of the gruntwork currently handled by doctors. By collecting the health data from its employees at first and more and more people, Amazon is able to train machines to perform diagnoses much better than humans do, leaving the need to consult a human doctor for really difficult cases. All claim processing will be performed by machines as well, leaving about 5% of the claims to actually be looked at closer by a human actor.
Amazon has the computing power to do it and now, the financial to achieve it. If you can't change an institution like healthcare, you have to start a new one from scratch...
Might be my brain overthinking this but still...
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday January 30 2018, @10:17PM
Remote medicine is already a thing, I guess. I've never Skyped a doctor personally. Replace it with an advanced AI: think WebMD + Amazon Alexa + IBM Watson.
That scenario could be a good thing if it's backed by the right technology. What we really want is a tricorder that could be used by a nurse to easily diagnose health problems. But in reality it's not so easy [wikipedia.org].
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @05:32AM
machines to do a lot of the gruntwork
Yes?
currently handled by doctors
Somebody's gonna have to invent the Tricorder first.
Ah. I see that takyon already mentioned that.
All claim processing will be performed by machines
When I first started reading, I thought that was where you were going.
Yeah, machines can reject claims at a much faster rate than humans can.
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