Amazon’s health ambitions clashed with medical best practices, nurses say

This article is exactly what a skeptic suspects: Amazon had a vision, rushed to roll it out quickly, and didn't care about its many shortcomings falling short of the law, best practice, or its own stated goal of quality health care. Some gems included: forcing patients to hang up and dial other numbers; asking nurses to store blood samples in their own cars; not collecting emergency contact information by default, settling for subpar medical software; and ignoring nurse safety concerns on house visits. There was also a remark that suggested Amazon would really like to take a "yeah, no" approach to HIPAA - gotta get that sweet sweet lucrative medical data, after all.

>The former telehealth nurse remembered an Amazon staffer telling her, “You know, a lot of people here consider you the warehouse workers of Amazon Care.”

I don't really want the person treating me to have a warehouse worker's skill set, and be evaluated on a warehouse worker's criteria.

Should come as a surprise to absolutely nobody.

Amazon's cost cutting race-to-the-bottom approach needs to stay as far away from the general population as possible.

While I do welcome a company like Amazon getting into the pharmacy space and using their power to lower drug costs, the potential for abuse is too great.

And that's without mentioning the staff of trained nurses and health professionals being managed under the same approach Amazon takes to manage its warehouse workers....

"But the former Amazon Care executive said there’s a “tension between what would give you good ratings versus what is sound clinical care.” The former nurses and executive who worked on Amazon Care said Care Medical bosses lacked the power to push back against some of Amazon’s decisions. “It comes down to who has leverage in the relationship,” said Andriola, from UC Irvine Health."

This is always true in every health facility I have ever seen or worked in - but Amazon doesn't have the licence to practice medicine or nursing, the doctor or nurse does. So the final decision-maker of what's appropriate is the clinician, it's their job to do the right thing, and bring up these issues with the medical or nursing director. And if you really think the clinical director is doing the wrong thing for patients, you report them to the state regulator which should also give you whistleblower protection in most states in the US, not just whine about it anonymously after you leave the company

You mean the company I can't trust to not sell me counterfeit goods, everything from cell phone chargers to condoms, now wants to sell me prescription medication?