What an Amazon Pharmacy Could Solve, and What It Won’t
Seamless refills and home delivery could help patients keep taking their drugs. Each year, failure to do so kills 125,000 Americans and costs over $100 billion.
Take those pills.
Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg
If Amazon’s move to disrupt health care is going to make Americans any healthier, the improvement is most likely to take place in the business of getting prescription drugs to patients more reliably. For one thing, there’s plenty of room for improvement. Failure to take prescription drugs kills about 125,000 Americans a year, according to a recent review in the Annals of Internal Medicine, and this form of noncompliance costs the health care system $100 billion to $289 billion a year.
PillPack — the online pharmacy service that Amazon.com Inc. bought this week — already simplifies health care for its customers by pre-sorting multiple prescriptions. Amazon could do even more by cutting down on the 20 to 30 percent of prescriptions that are reportedly never filled, easing communications between doctors and patients, and helping the medical community collect useful data on side effects and customer satisfaction.