SA国际传媒

Just a few months after acquired and shuttered its long-struggling telehealth arm Amazon Care, the company revealed a new telehealth offering on Tuesday: Amazon Clinic.

Amazon Clinic seems to be the health system鈥檚 answer to 鈥渁 quick check in,, especially at a time when doctors are juggling far too many patients every single day and patients are finding it hard to get an appointment.

Need your birth control refilled? Have an acne issue that requires a topical treatment? Through Amazon Clinic, patients can search for a particular ailment (there are around 20 that are applicable), scroll through a list of providers and how much they cost, and message with them virtually after filling out a quick intake form.

鈥淰irtual care isn鈥檛 right for every problem,鈥� , which makes sense for a messaging-only application.

The telehealth business model might be due for a change

Perhaps it鈥檚 smart that Amazon ventured back into telehealth after its flagship Amazon Care product disintegrated. Funding among telehealth startups hasn鈥檛 reverted back to pre-pandemic numbers, signaling telehealth adoption is a permanent change in the health care system. Per SA国际传媒 data, 2022 so far has seen over $1.3 billion in funding (compare that to 2019, when funding clocked in at less than $500,000).

Like most telehealth services we鈥檙e seeing right now, Amazon Clinic does not take insurance. But it鈥檚 unclear if the company plans on getting employers involved to offer the service as part of an employee benefits package, .

We鈥檝e addressed this before with , which announced $90 million in fresh funding on Monday. Specialized telehealth companies usually latch onto employers as part of a benefits package as opposed to partnering with insurance firms, which is a good way for doctors offices to circumvent tedious administrative requirements involved with being insurance-based. .

But we鈥檙e starting to see a shift in teletherapy.

Venture firms are increasingly looking at startups that use health insurance as part of their business model as it鈥檚 usually an indication of long-term patient and provider engagement. This is generally true for any health care offering that requires long-term care: mental health, chronic conditions or fertility, to name a few. It鈥檒l be interesting to see how this change of strategy in teletherapy will affect the rest of the telehealth space.

For what it鈥檚 worth, it doesn鈥檛 look like Amazon Clinic is meant to be that sort of platform.

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