Big Healthcare Stories. - This week in healthcare: Digital health deal-making begins with several suitors, Amazon Care expands nationwide, Doximity, Oscar, CVS, and more earnings, Tenet continues its outpatient expansion, telehealth expansion in Congress gets major progress, and more.
The Digital Health Consolidation Tsunami. Tremors in the Water: As we're now well underway into 2022, deal-making is just getting started. Several digital health and other mergers have been announced in recent weeks, all between players making strategic acquisitions. Firms are now realizing that offering one specialized endpoint solution isn't enough anymore: Specialized telehealth firm Thirty Madison and remote prescription drug firm Nurx are merging into one platform caring for about 750k 'active' patients and $300 million in revenue. - There doesn't seem to be much overlap between the two as far as patients are concerned, so I imagine the combined co now has a much larger patient base to cross-sell, larger scale to negotiate with payors, and a more attractive offering to sell to employers. (Link)
Doximity bought Amion for $82.5 billion, continuing to offer lots of useful products for physicians to bolster its ridiculously profitable advertising biz
Signify Health bought Caravan Health for $250 million (including payout incentives) to help it create an "end-to-end suite of value-based care" tools (notice a theme here?). Caravan will give SGFY access to 200 health systems and 3k providers. (Link)
Bottom Line: Digital health is no longer immune to the wave - or, rather, tsunami - of consolidation happening widespread in healthcare. This trend is just getting started as frothy private valuations fall apart, rates rise, and savvy competitors snap up the strategic pieces to create attractive offerings. (Link)
Something you'll probably read at least 20 times over the next few years: "This acquisition is just the beginning of our evolution toward a holistic, end-to-end care model..."
Amazon Care isn't going away. Scaling: After reshuffling some of its executive team on the pharmacy side and naming a former head of Amazon Prime to grow its healthcare biz, Amazon announced this week that the retail giant is expanding its virtual care services nationwide. (Link) - Details: Amazon Care will also offer a hybrid service offering (AKA, in-person and virtual) to 20 more cities this year. Basically all of the big ones. Amazon is also growing its contracted employer base by tacking on Silicon Labs and Hilton Hotels.
- Before you say anything: And no, I'm not counting Whole Foods in there. Amazon putting that in their press release is essentially the same thing as me saying that I sold my car to my wife...who happened to need a car.
Steady: Amazon is slowly scaling its health operation outside of its existing employee base and seems to be hyper focused on the consumerization of healthcare, which is the retail giant's bread and butter. I wouldn't be surprised to see a Pharmacy-Care-future health related offering as a tack-on to your normal Prime subscription within the next few years. | 
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