Amazon Moves Into Telemedicine, Acquiring Health Navigator

Amazon has acquired healthcare startup Health Navigator, its second acquisition as it develops Amazon Care for its employees.

Health Navigator, developed by Dr. David Thompson, an emergency room doctor and part-time faculty member at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, allows people to live chat or video chat with doctors and nurse practitioners. It also allows for in-person follow-ups from a registered nurse.

The acquisition, reported Wednesday by CNBC, follows last year’s acquisition of PillPack, which gave Amazon entrée into the online pharmacy market.

Purchase price for Health Navigator was not revealed.

“The service eliminates travel and wait time, connecting employees and their family members to a physician or nurse practitioner through live chat or video, with the option for in-person follow-up services from a registered nurse ranging from immunizations to instant strep throat detection,” an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC in an email.

Health Navigator, which has 11 to 50 employees according to LinkedIn, was founded in 2014 and offers symptom-checking tools to help with remote diagnoses to determine whether patients can stay home, need to see a doctor or need to head for an emergency room.

Amazon is launching its pilot telemedicine program for 50,000 of its nearly 650,000 employees. Those eligible all live and work in the Seattle area. If the program is successful, it eventually could be offered to Amazon’s retail customers. The company also involved in Haven, a joint healthcare venture with JP Morgan and Berkshire-Hathaway.

Telemedicine is a growing sector, with the number of patient visits rising more than 250% between 2015 to 2017 and the number of doctors involved doubling since 2015. Experts predict the sector could be worth $130.5 billion by 2025.

Thompson is best known for developing a set of telephone triage protocols used by medical centers and doctors offices that are used globally.