Amazon Care Is Shutting Down At The End Of 2022. Here’s Why.

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Three years after it began piloting a primary care service for its employees that blended telehealth and in-person medical services, Amazon plans to cease operations of its Amazon Care service.

Amazon just announced that it would end Amazon Care operations after December 31. In an email to Amazon Health Services employees, Neil Lindsay, senior vice president of Amazon Health Services, said Amazon Care wasn’t a sustainable, long-term solution for its enterprise customers.

Amazon provided a copy of the email to Fierce Healthcare.

The decision only impacts Amazon Care and Care Medical teams and not Amazon’s other healthcare services. While operating Amazon Care, the company “gathered and listened to extensive feedback” from its enterprise customers and their employees and evolved the service to continuously improve the experience for customers, Lindsay wrote in the email to employees.

“However, despite these efforts, we’ve determined that Amazon Care isn’t the right long-term solution for our enterprise customers, and have decided that we will no longer offer Amazon Care after December 31, 2022,” Lindsay wrote. “This decision wasn’t made lightly and only became clear after many months of careful consideration. Although our enrolled members have loved many aspects of Amazon Care, it is not a complete enough offering for the large enterprise customers we have been targeting, and wasn’t going to work long-term.”

Amazon Care was a cornerstone of the company’s efforts to expand its footprint in the healthcare industry. The online retail company piloted virtual urgent care and primary care services with Amazon employees and their families in the Seattle region in 2019.

Amazon Care has since expanded rapidly with telehealth services available in all 50 states and in-person services in at least seven cities, including Dallas, D.C. and Baltimore. As part of its ambitions in healthcare, Amazon then focused on ramping up partnerships with employers and signed on other companies as clients including Silicon Labs, TrueBlue, Whole Foods Market, Precor—a Washington-based fitness equipment company that was acquired by Peloton—and Hilton.

Some industry insiders have said that Amazon Care struggled to gain a foothold with employer clients.

The company was on track to rapidly expand its hybrid care model to more than 20 additional cities in 2022, including major metropolitan areas like San Francisco, Miami, Chicago and New York City.

CEO Andy Jassy has made healthcare a priority, citing Amazon Care as an example of “iterative innovation” in his first letter to shareholders earlier this year. In July, the company announced plans to buy concierge primary care provider One Medical in a deal valued at approximately $3.9 billion.

If the One Medical deal goes through, it would significantly expand Amazon’s foothold in the nearly $4 trillion healthcare market, specifically in the competitive primary care market.

One Medical markets itself as a membership-based, tech-integrated, consumer-focused primary care platform. The company operates 188 offices in 29 markets. At the end of March, One Medical had 767,000 members.

The deal also gives Amazon rapid access to the lucrative employer market as One Medical works with 8,000 companies. The One Medical acquisition has not yet closed.

Lindsay said the company’s work building Amazon Care has deepened its understanding of “what’s needed long-term to deliver meaningful health care solutions for enterprise and individual customers.”

“I believe the health care space is ripe for reinvention, and our efforts to help improve the health care experience can have an immensely positive impact on our quality of life and health outcomes. However, none of these reasons make this decision any easier for the teams that have helped to build Amazon Care, or for the customers our Care team serves,” Lindsay wrote.

“The decision to cease Amazon Care’s operations will likely mean some employees will be laid off.” Lindsay said in his email to employees. “Many Amazon Care employees will have an opportunity to join other parts of the Health Services organization or other teams at Amazon. We’ll also support employees looking for roles outside of the company.”

 

Source: Fierce Healthcare

The Commons Park Medical Office Project In Jacksonville Breaks Ground

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The developers of Commons Park, a medical office project in Campfield Commons in Jacksonville, announced Aug. 18 it has broken ground.

Commons Park is a partnership of Meek Development Group and JJM Realty Partners through 9084 RG Skinner PKW LLC.

The project comprises two one-story buildings totaling 13,980 square feet at RG Skinner Parkway, Anne Eliza Road and Lamb Tail Lane. It is planned for completion in the first quarter of 2023.

The property is next to Woodspring Suites near Interstate 295 and Baymeadows Road East.

Meek Development Group CEO Craig Meek said in a news release he worked with JJM Realty Partners President Jim Maurer 23 years ago on the conversion of Philips Highway Plaza into what is now called San Marco East Plaza.

 “Jim understands the Jacksonville market well, which allowed him to quickly see the merits of the location and the demand for new medical office product,” Meek said.

  “Jacksonville’s Healthcare industry has benefited from migration trends to southern states,” Maurer said in the release. “Its population growth has boosted demand for medical office space, which has a current inventory of primarily older vintage products with very little availability.”

The city is reviewing permit applications for two shell buildings at a job cost of $1.4 million on 1.78 acres.

 

Source: Jacksonville Daily Record

Some Rural Hospitals Are In Such Bad Shape, Local Governments Are Practically Giving Them Away

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Kyle Kopec gets a kick out of leading tours through the run-down hospitals his boss is snapping up, pointing out what he calls relics of poor management left by a revolving door of operators.

But there’s a point to exposing their state of disrepair — the company he works for, Braden Health, is buying buildings worth millions of dollars for next to nothing. At a hospital in this rural community about a 90-minute drive northwest from Nashville, the X-ray machine is beyond repair.

“This system is so old, it’s been using a floppy disk,” said Kopec, 23, marveling at the bendy black square that hardly has enough memory to hold a single digital photo. “I’ve never actually seen a floppy disk in use. I’ve seen them in the Smithsonian.”

Not only is Kopec young, he had limited work experience in hospitals before helping lead a buying spree by Braden Health. His prior work experience includes a three-month stint as an intern in the Trump White House, on assignment through his volunteer position in the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary. He worked his way through college at Braden Health’s clinic in Ave Maria, Florida, and became a protégé of Dr. Beau Braden, the company’s founder. Now Kopec’s official title is chief compliance officer, second in command to Braden.

The hospitals Braden Health is taking over sit in one of the worst spots in one of the worst states for rural hospital closures. Tennessee has experienced 16 closures since 2010 — second only to the far more populous state of Texas, which has had at least 21 closures.

The local governments that own these facilities are finding that remarkably few companies — with any level of experience — are interested in buying them. And those that are willing don’t want to pay much, if anything.

“When you’re on the ropes or even got your head under water, it’s really difficult to negotiate with any terms of strength,” said Michael Topchik, director of the Chartis Center for Rural Health, which tracks distressed rural hospitals closely. “And so you, oftentimes, are choosing whoever is willing to choose you. At this point, large health systems have acquired or affiliated with the hospitals that have the fewest problems. And what’s left has been picked over by operators, some of which have gotten in trouble with insurers and even law enforcement for shady billing practicesYou can make it profitable. But it takes an awful lot to get there.”

Braden, an emergency room doctor and addiction specialist, used his savings and inherited wealth to get into the hospital-buying business in 2020. Previously, he tried to build a hospital in southwestern Florida, where he owns the large rural clinic in Ave Maria. After running into regulatory roadblocks, he saw more opportunity in reopening hospitals — which brought him to Tennessee.

Braden Health’s corporate headquarters has 40 employees, according to Kopec. It’s a limited liability company and privately held, so it doesn’t have to publicly share much about its financial figures. But in filings for a certificate of need that outlines why a health care facility should be allowed to operate, Braden revealed $2 million in monthly revenue from the one hospital it ran in Lexington, Tennessee, and its balance sheet showed more than $7.5 million cash on hand.

Since buying that Lexington hospital in 2020, Braden Health has signed deals for three other failing or failed hospitals and has looked at acquiring at least 10 others, mostly in Tennessee and North Carolina. Braden Health’s strategy is to build mini-networks to share staff and supplies.

At the hospital in Erin, much of the facility’s equipment is older than Kopec. And he said using outdated technology has caused Medicare to penalize the hospital with reduced payments.

The attic houses a ham radio system that seemingly never got much use, Kopec said on his way out to the roof. He wanted to show how the giant HVAC system can be controlled only from a rusty side panel accessible by a ladder. Down below, an emergency room has never been used. During a recent renovation that predated Braden Health’s ownership, its doors were built too narrow for a gurney, among other design flaws.

An old operating room is temporarily housing the ER while Braden Health starts work on new renovations. The Tennessee attorney general, who must approve any sale of a public hospital to private investors, signed off in July.

To prevent this hospital’s closure in 2013, Houston County bought it for $2.4 million and raised taxes locally to subsidize operations.

“We had no business being in the hospital business,” Mayor James Bridges said. “The majority of county governments do not have the expertise and the education and knowledge that it takes to run health care facilities in 2022.”

Those with the most experience, like big corporate hospital chains based in Nashville, have been getting out of the small hospital business, too.

Communities have seen unqualified managers come and go. In Decatur County, where Braden Health is also taking over the local hospital, the previous CEO was indicted on theft charges that remain pending. And the Tennessee comptroller determined the hospital helped endanger the finances of the entire county.

“You’re looking to someone who supposedly knows what to do, who can supposedly solve the issue. And you trust them, then you’re disappointed,” said Lori Brasher, a member of Decatur County’s economic development board. “And not disappointed once, but disappointed multiple times.”

Brasher expressed much more confidence in Braden Health, which she said has concrete plans to reopen, though the timing has been delayed by an unresolved insurance claim from a burst water line that flooded a wing of the hospital.

Local residents still have trouble stomaching the sticker price: $100 for a property valued at $1.4 million by the local tax assessor. In addition to that low price, Braden Health won tax breaks for committing to invest $2 million into the building.

The Houston County hospital is valued at $4.1 million by the property assessor. But the final sale price was just $20,000 — and that wasn’t for the land or the building. Kopec said the amount was for a 2016 ambulance with 180,000 miles — deemed the only equipment with any remaining value.

An agreement with Braden Health to take over the shuttered hospital in Haywood County, Tennessee, valued at $4.6 million, was a similarly symbolic payment. All told, Braden Health is getting more than $10 million worth of real estate for less than the price of an appendectomy.

Kopec contends the value for each property is essentially negative given that the hospitals require so much investment to comply with health care standards and — according to the company’s purchase agreements — must be run as hospitals. If not, the hospitals revert to the counties.

Most of the funding for restoring these facilities comes directly from Braden, who thinks people overestimate the value of hospitals his company is taking over.

“If you look honestly at a lot of transactions that take place with rural hospitals and how many liabilities are tied up with them, there’s really not a lot of value there,” Braden said.

Braden recently paid off a $2.3 million debt with Medicare for the Houston County hospital. He said there’s no secret sauce, in his mind, except that small hospitals require just as much diligence as big medical centers — especially since their profit margins are so thin and patient volume so low. He wants to improve technology in ways that health plans reward hospitals, limit nurse staffing when business is slow, and watch medical supply inventories to cut waste.

“A lot of people aren’t willing to put in the time, effort, energy, and work for a small hospital with less than 25 beds. But it needs just as much time, energy, and effort as a hospital with 300 beds,” Braden said. “I just see there’s a huge need in rural hospitals and not a lot of people who can focus their time doing it.”

It’s a tall order. Braden said he can understand any skepticism, even from the hospitals’ employees. They’ve heard turnaround promises before, and even they can be wary of the care they’d get at such run-down facilities.

Still, as Kopec bounced through the Erin hospital’s halls, he greeted nurses and clerical staff by name with a confidence that belies his age and experience. He tells anyone who will listen that rural hospitals require specialized knowledge.

“They’re not the most complicated things in the world,” Kopec said. “But if you don’t know exactly how to run them, you’re just going to run them straight into the ground.”

 

Source: News-Medical Life Sciences