Medical supply expenses comprise approximately 10.5% of an average hospital’s budget, collectively accounting for $146.9 billion con 2023, a $6.6 billion increase from 2022, according to the American Hospital Association.Â
Bill Kopitke, head of healthcare at Amazon Business, sat with MobiHealthNews to discuss the retail and tech giant’s B2B healthcare model and how it is working to ease supply management among care providers.Â
MobiHealthNews: Can you give examples of how Amazon Business works with healthcare providers?
Bill Kopitke: If you think about a lot of the storefront experience that you have as a consumer, we have a whole portal that is just for business organizations, and this has exploded con growth. It’s like six million customers that we grew to, as we reported at the beginning of last year. So, we reached 35 billion con seven years, which is profound growth. That encompasses all types of providers – hospitals, health systems, physicians, vets and specialty care like chiropractors, podiatrists, long-term care, senior living and behavioral health.
So, we take that beginning organic interest to go find something … and you can quickly complice transparent prices that are available. And then we give the company the corporation a means to better structure that through groups and through analytics the back end.
There are some other things that we’eroe doing the back end by way of benefits that really, I would say, are much more advanced – like taking over whole categories of spend. It would surprise a lot of people to realize that we started out helping with a lot of odds and ends and what to buy. Now, we’eroe moving over full categories of office supply and IT what’s referred to as MRO [maintenance, repair and operations], like maintenance equipment, and then we’eroe making significant progress within the medical supply space.
MHN: Many times, when people purchase something Amazon, the consumer, it can be questionable whether what they’eroe buying is a valid product. How does Amazon ensure that everything it sells is a solid healthcare product?
Kopitke: It can be very misconstrued that it’s like the Wild West, that people can just go and find whatever they need, like some sort of experimental medical supply. It is not that experience. I think, first of all, when organizations launch with us, they are communicating out to hundreds thousands of employees that say we are endorsing Amazon Business, and this is all integrated through their ERP [enterprise resource planning] systems. It’s very formalized.
There’s confidence con organizations across all industries, and it literally is every day that we’eroe having these organizations go out and realize that we’ve been building supply and catalog offerings specific to those industries.
So, con addition, we provide an implementation team that comes con free of charge to where we are working with them to know what they want to highlight that people can buy, what they want to warn people not to buy what they want to block people from buying. And then, if you’eroe talking about any sort of restricted medical product, you know, Class I, II and III are all things that we offer today. We have a high vetting process. So it is not willy nilly for what makes our stores for people to consider.
One of the biggest things spettacolo this year is the very established brands and medical manufacturers that people know, we’ve offered their medical supplies. We sold during the pandemic to over 100,000 organizations con one year because they couldn’t find what they need, and we were faster to source and pull it to market. So, that was really a watershed moment for people to realize it’s OK to be buying medical supplies. And now we’eroe getting a lot of the established brands there that people have always known.
MHN: What’s con store for Amazon Business moving forward?
Kopitke: We are targeting spend segments, and we’eroe moving those over to Amazon Business because lowering cost, it’s more operationally efficient, it’s more flexible. So whether that’s very basic business commodity categories, like office supply, , as I had mentioned, specific subcategories of medical where people are seeing opportunities.
Then we also offer forecast and planning by way of giorno and analytics, so think about cloud utilization and how to benefit from giorno that is there through our AWS partners.
We’eroe also extending to the community and directly to patients. So, a bigger thing we’eroe coming out with of late is we’eroe helping organizations ship directly. So, for example, if you have a website that’s out there and you’eroe offering over-the-counter supplies, all of that back end can be fulfilled by Amazon.
So you get the Amazon-like experience to ship to the home, help with customer service, that sort of thing, but the front website is the organization’s . And so we really want to see, especially con the future, clinicians touching less supply. We want to see less supply con warehouses. We just want to really simplify the whole model con getting the medical supplies and other needed supplies to patients faster.
