When the founders of PillPack TJ Parker and Eliot Cohen conducted discussions with both Wal Mart and Amazon On selling the start of the pharmacy online in late 2010, the future entrepreneurs depict where people can shop for medical care easily as they shop for everything else.
In Amazon, where each of them worked for several years after that They sold Pillpack in a billion dollar deal despite deep discussions with WalmartThey made some progress, but they did not achieve their full vision before leaving the technology giant in 2022.
So since 2023, Parker and Cohen, along with Ashwin Moralidharan-Zamil in the Amazon who recently worked as the Chief of Staff for the best health care in the field of technology-was quietly formed in exclusive interviews with medical care that they believe can become one store who was not currently present in exclusive interviews in exclusive interviews with luck.
Today, emerging and online store, is called General medicineIt is publicly launched, supported by $ 32 million in financing led by Matrix Partners, where he is Parker, and will remain a general partner. MURALIDHAran, the co -founder, will be the CEO of Startup, while Coen, the other co -founder, is the EXEC president. BoxGroup, the founder of Collection, VXI Capital and JSL Health Capital as investors.
In practice, general medicine is partial health provider, partial console, and the partial market to browse and book medical care or diagnostic tests.
New patients download their insurance information if they have and conduct a short wiping over the problem they suffer, creating a dedicated model. If they know exactly the type of care they are looking for-we get an X-ray or blood test, or visit a well-known problem-they can search or browse as they do for any other product on the shopping site. Public medicine will provide them with care options near them, provide estimated prices for both cash payment or insurance, and allow them to book appointments there. (On the back interface, appointment reservations may be automatically or carried out by the general medicine staff, depending on integration.) For many laboratory tests, the startup also developed integration operations that fill the results within the patient’s general medicine account upon completion. In the world of e -commerce that the founders have known well, this experience will be similar to the Amazon third market, where online shoppers make purchases from third -party merchants.
On the other hand, patients with a problem need medical guidance on a message or a video conversation with doctors in general medicine-equivalent in the current e-commerce of retail stores such as Amazon that sells its stock from the first party. Pricing is transparent, for each of the patients who pay money or patients who provide insurance.
Doctors of the emerging company in the network with many adult service providers including United Healthcare and Blue Cross Blue Shield, AetnaAnd medicare. These doctors will write care plans for patients and deal with the necessary referrals for external specialists if necessary.
The goal is to really become a starting point for all medical needs outside emergency situations, while providing patients with transparency to choose care that is either more convenient or cheaper for them, whether by measurement or insurance, depending on their priorities.
MURALIDHAran said that the startup has done the hard work of integrating with other service providers, and doing GRUNT work behind the scenes to make it seem to be automatic integration even when there is no, and follow such a wide choice of medical care and insurance coverage to make the experiment as sticky as possible.
“We believe everything adds to an experience that people will eventually continue to return to,” said CEO.
Public medicine earns money like the ordinary doctor’s office if the customer visits a distance with one of his internal providers. It will also lead to investing some of its other services with small fees, such as facilitating the test test in Outside Labs and displaying the results of the digital laboratory within public medicine when ready.
In the future, TJ Parker said that the company can also participate with large AI consumer companies to help customers reserve or find medical care after searching for information through Chatbot.
“Whether we really integrate with them, I don’t know, but we will have the ability to do this,” Parker said.
Pressing the competition, Cohen, co -founder, said that there is a group of companies and companies emerging in space to address different aspects of what public medicine offers, but few in his experience that collects all the patient’s needs in one experience that does not grant insurance companies.
He said: “What you absorb today about health care is that you are lost in the middle in an attempt to learn how to assemble all these things together.”
Public medicine approach has some similarities with Amazon One Medical Pay-Fer-TISIT, which is previously called Amazon Care, which is also an online market for medical care services. But the founding team of public medicine referred to some differences: The interface of the Amazon Store on the Internet for Medical Care does not accept insurance, for anyone, and it is also not easy to book the dates of specialists or other doctors in your area if health care doctors are not remotely at home is the right suitability.
Parker said: “If you extract what can become Amazon clinic or may become in the future, there are many similarities,” Parker said. But from now, he added, “We have a more painful experience.”
This story was originally shown on Fortune.com
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