Harry shares his thoughts about Amazon’s prospects in the pharmaceuticals market:
As Amazon seeks to continue its healthy pace of growth and leverage its massive distribution network, expanding into pharmaceutical distribution would be a logical move and natural extension of its business. With net sales of $136 billion in 2016, Amazon cannot ignore the potential growth that could be realized from the health care industry, which currently accounts for nearly 18% of U.S. GDP and could reach 25% over the next few decades.
Read the full article here.
Let’s pray Amazon, if they move into pharmaceuticals, will keep a culture of life in place. The culture of death–physician assisted suicide/euthanasia, etc. — destroys the basic standard in our healthcare system–namely, Patient Centered Care. In the culture of death, the patient’s “menu” becomes limited to the least costly choice–suicide drugs. What happened to patient-centered care? It goes out the window. Coupled with provider profiling (doctor tracking that is done by health insurers now) and provider financial incentives (which are in place now to reduce costs)–these make sense when we have a culture of life. Provider profiling is used in quality improvement to track readmissions, deaths, etc. for the purpose of providing data & feedback to providers on best practices and quality improvement. Provider financial incentives are used to reduce costs–again appropriate as America has the highest healthcare costs in the world. The great equalizer of all of this is that we keep life and human dignity at the center. We can only have good provider profiling data and good financial incentives if they incent providers to provide patient centered care oriented to life and human dignity of the patient from conception to natural death.
Enjoying your Becoming the Best book very much. Comment about Northshore. Kudos to their success. On EMR, selling points were potential to reduce errors, improve patient safety and outcomes and reduce waste , particularly time, getting information, and getting complete records of patients meds, etc. Yet, the success of rollout was not measured in those terms. Rather, in speed of implementation. I submit that is not success – yet! Stick with the hard work as identified by the prior metrics. Those are where value is created. We have enormous problems with medical error, as demonstrated by the Institute of Medicine’s classic report “To Err is
Human”. This is still an enormous problem today. A leader like Northshore could add tangible value to our healthcare system by really making inroads on medical error and reduction of wasted time. I hope they will do this. (As you know, the 8th waste in Lean
IS the waste of talent, human potential.
Enough said.)
I agree with everything in your commentary professor, except their need to justify their stock price. That is just not a beat Jeff Bezos has any interest in drumming to. Such is the good fortune of the autocratic/founder CEO. (Kellogg ’07)
Hi thanks for possting this