Google drops Amazon’s One Medical
Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
For years, Google was the largest business customer of One Medical, the primary-care provider Amazon acquired for $3.9 billion.
But as Amazon closed the One Medical deal last year, Google decided to terminate its enterprise agreement with the healthcare company, according to an internal document obtained by B-17.
“We are also disappointed that our largest enterprise client, Google, decided to end its agreement with ONEM in favor of another provider,” the Amazon document said.
Under the enterprise agreement, Google offered its employees discounted or free One Medical memberships. It also ran One Medical care centers at some Google offices. The agreement is set to expire at the end of this year.
Google was a major customer
One Medical’s loss of Google as an enterprise client is a setback for Amazon’s healthcare efforts.
Google was an early backer of One Medical and was its largest business customer for many years. Until 2020, One Medical disclosed that Google accounted for 10% of its net revenue. In 2021, that dipped below 10%, and then One Medical stopped publicly sharing financials after Amazon acquired it.
Since purchasing One Medical, Amazon has embarked on a number of cost-cutting moves, including layoffs and office closures, as BI previously reported. Amazon also shut down the Amazon Care telehealth service in 2022 and scrapped its Halo fitness tracker last year.
To boost its customer base, Amazon rolled out a new One Medical discount option for Prime members late last year.
Googlers will have to pay for One Medical
A Google spokesperson confirmed to BI that the existing relationship with One Medical would change after 2024 but said the decision had nothing to do with Amazon’s new ownership of the healthcare provider.
The existing One Medical centers on Google’s campuses have already transitioned to Premise Health to provide more services like pharmacy, gynecology, and coordinated care on-site, the spokesperson added.
One Medical is set to remain an in-network provider for Google employees. That means Google’s health insurance will be accepted at One Medical offices, though Google employees will have to pay for their own memberships going forward.
In an email to BI, an Amazon spokesperson said Google employees and their dependents would continue to have One Medical memberships “sponsored” by their employer through the end of 2024.
“One Medical is proud of the care we have provided to Google employees at a small number of locations on Google campuses, virtually, and in our hundreds of community offices near where many Google employees live, work, and shop,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
More direct engagement
For this year, One Medical is refocusing its enterprise-sales efforts on “medium-sized clients,” while working on building a better strategy for large corporate customers, the internal document said.
To increase engagement with large enterprise customers, One Medical plans to improve its direct-to-employee communications with more health-benefit data, the document said.
It wants to contractually require enterprise customers to provide employee contact information to enable direct communication, which typically results in higher usage, it added. The company also intends to collect member-reported health data during enrollment and regularly engage employees via push notifications from the One Medical app, according to the document.
“In 2024, using targeted campaigns and incentives, we aim to increase the percentage of enterprise members who had an annual wellness visit within the last year from 16% to 28% (160K total members), a 75% increase,” the document said.
In a statement to BI, Amazon’s spokesperson said One Medical continued to see “very strong growth,” while Amazon’s broader healthcare business was “growing robustly.”
One Medical works with about 10,000 businesses across the US to provide comprehensive primary-care services to their employees, and “this number continues to grow,” the spokesperson added.
