Big Tech Should Stick To Core Competencies
Brendan Keeler, Senior PM at Zus Health, on building infrastructure for digital health
The real opening for big tech in healthcare is not replacing hospitals, it is removing the boring friction around them. Amazon fits best where care looks like logistics and commerce, booking a visit, routing a prescription, delivering medication, or bundling virtual care with membership. Apple fits best where health looks like consumer software, pulling records into the iPhone and letting apps organize and use that data. The hard part begins when either company tries to run labor heavy clinical operations.
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Amazon’s healthcare moves line up with assets it already owns, distribution, pharmacy, subscriptions, and a national consumer surface. The model is convenience first, not novel medicine. That is why telehealth, medication fulfillment, and One Medical membership fit better than building a net new care system from scratch.
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Apple’s winning wedge is the phone as the patient dashboard. Health Records lets people sign into provider portals and pull medications, labs, and immunizations into one view on iPhone. That builds leverage for devices and apps, without Apple needing to manage clinics, staffing, reimbursement, and medical operations directly.
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Digital health history shows why focus matters. Telehealth companies grew fast by making a narrow workflow feel simple, answer questions online, talk to a clinician, get treatment delivered. But scaling full care delivery is operationally messy, and even Amazon later shut down Amazon Care while continuing through pharmacy, clinic marketplace, and One Medical.
The next phase belongs to incumbents that plug their native strengths into healthcare workflows instead of trying to reinvent medicine. Amazon is likely to keep compressing the path from symptom to visit to prescription. Apple is likely to keep becoming the default consumer record layer. The companies that matter most will be the ones that make healthcare feel easier, not the ones that try to own every clinical step.