Workplace

An Amazonified One Medical may be too convenient for customers to resist

Amazon’s One Medical purchase is unlikely to deter consumers and employers from the service, experts said.

One Medical building

What does Amazon's plan to acquire One Medical mean for health data?

Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Amazon is increasingly hard to escape: It's your grocer via Whole Foods, your convenience store via Prime, your home assistant via Alexa. And soon, it could be your primary care provider.

"I am less than pleased to learn that Amazon is acquiring my doctor," tweeted cloud consultant Corey Quinn after catching wind of Amazon's plan to acquire One Medical for roughly $3.9 billion. It was a common reaction among some One Medical patients, of which there were 736,000 as of December 2021.


The deal will not only shake up direct-to-consumer care; it could transform employer-based health care as well. One Medical works with more than 8,500 enterprises that offer employees access to the provider’s in-person and telehealth services. Some employers even house One Medical clinics on-site.

The acquisition may ring antitrust alarm bells, but it will be difficult for regulators to target, as primary care is a new space for Amazon. This means consumers and human resource managers will likely have to decide themselves whether to embrace an Amazonified One Medical, weighing data concerns against convenience. Many may be inclined to choose the latter, considering the mess that is the American health care system.

“For so many people, convenience trumps anything else,” said Christina Farr, a health tech investor with OMERS Ventures. “If they're going to offer a convenient, affordable experience for people, then that might be the thing that causes them to join a service like this versus cancel their membership.”

Is your medical data vulnerable to Amazon’s whims?

Your medical information should be safe. Compromising individual One Medical records would be devastating for Amazon. It is illegal, folks! An Amazon spokesperson told Protocol that One Medical customers’ HIPAA-protected information will be “handled separately from all other Amazon businesses” should the deal close.

“As required by law, Amazon will never share One Medical customers’ personal health information outside of One Medical for advertising or marketing purposes of other Amazon products and services without clear permission from the customer,” the spokesperson wrote.

For Quinn, the concern lies in Amazon simply having access to this data. In his view, Amazon is too large a company with too many opportunities for internal data misuse. Amazon’s track record of data protection on Prime is by no means perfect. A 2020 Wall Street Journal investigation found that Amazon employees used data about independent sellers to develop competing products, which then-CEO Jeff Bezos couldn’t deny to Congress. In late 2021, Wired revealed carelessness by employees in handling Amazon’s retail customer data.

“When you have 1.4 million employees, you can’t guarantee that anything has never happened,” Quinn said. “I don't particularly want the notes from my therapy appointments being something that anyone at Amazon has access to.”

Not all health information is protected by HIPAA, which focuses on privacy in a patient-provider relationship. Amazon can already access a lot of this kind of data. A simple Prime purchase can provide valuable insight into our health — a fact that has especially crystallized for Americans in a post-Roe world. Data privacy expert Debbie Reynolds said Amazon’s direct access to much of this secondary health information, coupled with ownership of the portals holding more sensitive health data, is where people’s concern lies.

I don't particularly want the notes from my therapy appointments being something that anyone at Amazon has access to.

“The concern is having such a big, powerful company that has [its] hands in so many different areas of people’s lives being able to also gather data about people, even tangentially, around their health,” Reynolds said.

When it comes to digital data security, the consequences for individuals are hypothetical and murky. But the end result for Amazon is clear: It’s a win. One Medical’s data might help inform future Amazon AI-based health products. “When you’re a first-party data holder, which Amazon will be, there’s more that you can do with data,” Reynolds said.

Quinn canceled his One Medical membership and exported his medical records, but he isn’t sure whether the company will accommodate his request to delete all of his medical data. One Medical did not respond to Protocol’s request for comment on the company’s data deletion policies.

Could this make consumer and employee health care more convenient?

Yes, it could. Farr said the deal may represent Amazon’s ambitions to build a “digital front door” to health care. Primary care is increasingly elusive for most Americans. One Medical, which some describe as “concierge medicine,” isn’t exactly the picture of accessibility just yet. It has a $199 annual membership fee and is primarily urban. Still, a Prime-like digital interface for health care could be transformative.

“There’s no real shopping experience for health care,” Farr said. “Nobody’s done that.”

Josh Bersin, an HR industry analyst, is in favor of bringing retail and health care closer together. He described a scenario that, depending on your data and surveillance inclinations, might strike you as either useful or dystopian.

“Imagine you're clicking through the Amazon web page, you click on a bottle of aspirin, and the website says, ‘Are you having problems with headaches?’” Bersin said. “‘Would you like to visit a clinic? Click here to make an appointment.’ I mean, that's not a bad idea.”

Michael Yang, health tech and workplace tech investor at OMERS Ventures, said the deal likely doesn’t change One Medical’s appeal to enterprises, even if employees have concerns about health data. He thinks the One Medical purchase will go better for Amazon than its previous attempt to disrupt employee health care, Haven.

“You’re able to take a job and be matched with a primary care physician through a clinic type of model,” Yang said. “And then you have different modalities. It could be in person, it could be virtual. It could be at a pop-up.”

What about competitors, like Google, that provide One Medical memberships for employees and host clinics on-site? Yang doesn’t see the deal deterring Google or other companies’ adoption of One Medical. One Medical’s primary care model may bring self-insured employers’ health care expenses down, and the telehealth, near-site and on-site offerings are too convenient, he said.

“It would be penny-wise, pound-foolish to take a stand against a quote-unquote competitor when your employees need it and you as an employer want them to have it,” Yang said.

But One Medical isn’t the only boutique primary care outfit out there, competing against direct health care companies like Premise Health and Crossover Health (which Amazon previously partnered with to launch employee health centers). If nervous employees lobby against an Amazon-backed One Medical or employers become spooked, they have other options.

“We’ll see how it goes with Amazon being part of that bidding process,” Farr said. “They’re certainly not the only ones.”

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins