Hearing Amazon’s Footsteps, the Health Care Industry Shudders<br />“The pharmacy business was always a topic of interest when I was with Amazon,<br />and there was a sincere desire on the part of Amazon to create a better customer experience across pharmacy and health care as a whole,” he said.<br />“My advice is that executives at pharmaceutical companies should crush all assumptions when it comes to Amazon<br />and their ability to enter, innovate and reimagine the pharmacy business and health care,” he said.<br />In Connecticut, for example, the license is for “wholesale of drugs, cosmetics<br />and medical devices,” while in Louisiana it was granted to a “drug or device distributor.”<br />Brian Tanquilut, an analyst for Jefferies, noted that the company acquired many of the wholesale pharmacy licenses between fall of last year<br />and early this year, around when the company started selling medical supplies to businesses.<br />Expanding the pharmacy business without the aid of a major pharmacy-benefit manager would be tough,<br />because the benefit managers serve as gatekeepers to insured patients, deciding which pharmacies they can and cannot use.<br />To do this, Amazon would need retail pharmacy licenses in every state — a hurdle, certainly, but not an insurmountable one, the analysts said.<br />If Amazon wanted to go bigger, Ms. Gupte and others said, it could sell to insured customers<br />and even serve as a pharmacy-benefit manager, overseeing drug coverage for people on behalf of insurers and large employers.<br />“It’s not evidence of a retail entry into the pharmacy business,” he said.
