Amazon.com Inc. announced this morning that Amazon Care, its telehealth service, is now available in the United States

First introduced in 2019, Amazon Care allows users to schedule telehealth sessions with a doctor or nurse through a mobile app. The service also allows users to request a medical professional to visit them at home.

While the Amazon Care app is now available nationwide, home care services are currently only available in eight cities: Seattle, Baltimore, Boston, Dallas, Austin, Los Angeles, Arlington, and Washington, DC.

Amazon said today that it plans to expand availability to more than 20 additional cities by the end of the year. The feature will be available in, among other places, San Francisco, Miami, Chicago and New York.

Amazon has been in the adjacent drugstore market for several years, in part thanks to its Acquisition 2018 of PillPack Inc. for $1 billion. With Amazon Care, users can have prescriptions delivered to a nearby pharmacy or shipped through the Amazon Pharmacy service, which offers free delivery options. Amazon Care also offers a number of other features, including the ability to access treatment summaries.

Amazon does not provide Amazon Care directly to consumers, but rather offers the service to businesses. Businesses that sign up can make Amazon Care available to their employees. Amazon says its subsidiary Whole Foods Market and Silicon Laboratories Inc., a major semiconductor design company, are among the organizations that have embraced Amazon Care so far.

Amazon’s decision to make the service available nationwide today is the culmination of a gradual rollout that began more than two years ago.

In fall 2019, Amazon made Amazon Care available to Seattle employees. In March 2021, the e-commerce and cloud computing giant announcement that it would begin offering the service to other companies in Washington State. Amazon first unveiled plans to make the service available nationwide in the same month.

“Patients are tired of a healthcare system that doesn’t put them first,” said Kristen Helton, director of Amazon Care. “Our patient-centric service is changing that, one visit at a time. We offered our on-demand primary and emergency care services to patients across the country. As we expand the service, we will continue to work with our customers to meet their needs.

Amazon Web Services Inc., the company’s cloud computing business, has also increased its presence in the healthcare sector. Last July, AWS spear Amazon HealthLake, a cloud service that enables healthcare organizations to collect medical information from their internal systems in one place and use that information to improve patient care. The Amazon unit introduced an offering called AWS for Health around the same time that combines its cloud services with solutions developed by partners.

Photo: Amazon