| THIS WEEK IN HEALTHCARE
What happened in healthcare this week—and what we think about it.
1. Amazon Clinic expands nationwide. Amazon announced that it has expanded its direct-to-consumer virtual care platform to all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Amazon Clinic, which the e-commerce giant launched in 32 states last November, connects consumers to third-party clinicians via Amazon’s website or mobile app. Through video call or message-based visits (the latter of which are only available in some states), it offers diagnosis and treatment for a range of low-acuity, common health conditions like pink eye and sinus infections. The clinic features flat, upfront cash pricing, and doesn’t currently accept insurance. On the provider side, Amazon is partnering with telehealth companies Wheel, SteadyMD, Curai Health, and Hello Alpha.
The Gist: This is the kind of venture at which Amazon excels: creating a marketplace convenient for buyers and sellers (patients and telemedicine providers, respectively), pricing it competitively to pursue scale over margins, and upselling customers by pairing care with Amazon’s other products or services (like Amazon Pharmacy). We’ll be watching for how Amazon builds on this service, and whether it connects Amazon Clinic to its Prime membership and One Medical assets. In the meantime, in addition to its consumer-focused offerings, Amazon is also simultaneously expanding its enterprise workflow offerings through its AWS for Health division, recently launching HealthScribe and HealthImaging.
2. Signs of a summer COVID bump could signal a tougher fall. After experiencing steadily declining numbers across 2023, the country is currently seeing an uptick in COVID-19 hospitalizations, which increased 12 percent week-over-week, to approximately 8,000 in the week ending July 22. This rise, the largest since December, follows an increase in national wastewater levels of COVID across the past month, particularly in the Northeast and South. Given that most health agencies are no longer tracking COVID case levels, and many Americans are no longer getting tested or testing themselves, actual case counts are unclear.
The Gist: Though COVID hospitalizations are up, weekly totals are still among the lowest the nation has seen since the pandemic began. And while COVID deaths are a lagging indicator, the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data charts them at their lowest level since the start of the pandemic. Nonetheless, if this COVID uptick continues into fall, we could once again be facing a “tripledemic” of COVID, flu, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) circulating at high levels all at once, straining hospital resources. Fortunately, an updated COVID vaccine is coming this fall. Urging Americans, particularly older and vulnerable patients, to get vaccinated for all three viruses will be critical—although convincing individuals to get three separate shots will increase the challenge.
3. Family of Henrietta Lacks settles over use of cells that have fueled modern medical innovations. Descendants of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman once treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital, whose cells have been used for scientific research over more than a half century, announced this week that they reached a settlement with Thermo Fisher Scientific over its use of cells that were obtained without Lacks’ consent in 1951. These cells were the first to reproduce in a laboratory, and have fueled myriad discoveries and advancements in medicine, including the development of the polio vaccine, treatments for Parkinson’s, and sequencing the human genome. The family’s lawsuit accused the biotech company of selling the cells and profiting from products the cells have helped develop without seeking either Lacks’ or her family’s permission or approval. The terms of the settlement are confidential.
The Gist: Anyone who has gone through medical training knows the importance of “HeLa” cells in fueling decades of medical innovation. This settlement brings light to the fact that for decades, tissue from patients, particularly those in the charity care system, has been used without patient consent, with no sharing in the profits from advances that would not have been possible without their contribution. Although most patients who undergo procedures at academic centers today sign away their rights to removed tissue, and this settlement doesn’t create legal precedent for other suits, we hope it renews debate about whether patients should have a stake in the profits directly derived from their contributions.
Plus—what we’ve been reading.
4. Price transparency has employers asking why insurance companies aren’t getting them a better deal. A recent Bloomberg article details how several large companies have recently sued the health insurers administering their benefit plans, accusing them of wasting money by overpaying insurance claims in excess of what was billed, often to the tune of millions of dollars in excess costs. They allege that some third-party administrators (TPAs) have refused requests to audit their payments, claiming that they can’t share this information with their employer clients, despite recent regulations that look to ban “gag clauses” in insurer contracts with providers. UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, Elevance, and other large insurers have all been targeted with legal action for overpaying providers and failing to provide sufficient transparency into their contracts.
The Gist: We’ve long thought that employers have the best platform to challenge insurance companies on whether they are truly delivering the highest-value product to their customers. A key issue here is whether or not courts view TPAs as fiduciaries, legally responsible for acting in their clients’ best interests. Court rulings on this issue to date have named employers themselves as the fiduciaries of their self-funded health plans, requiring them to make sure insurance money is doled out responsibly. But in a Catch-22, employers are not able to do that if their TPAs refuse to share claims payment data. And it is the insurers who negotiate contracts with providers, which govern reimbursement levels and payment terms. Breaking open payer-provider contracts with new transparency requirements has given employers a new window into how their healthcare benefit dollars are spent—and they seem unimpressed by what they’re seeing.
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