Global E-commerce leader Amazon has been involved in an increasingly wide range of businesses and the media have long been aware of many people and the recent completion of the purchase and the United States chain of retail sales (Whole Foods), entered the physical storefront management is one example. Now, many people are beginning to anticipate that Amazon's health care market is a matter of sooner or later. A column analysis of the Forbes magazine points out that while Amazon can afford to buy and fast access to the health care market with its rich financial resources, it is not a good strategy to sell drugs at large stores such as Wal-Mart and Target, if it buys a chain store to run it. Because it turns out that the profits are actually pretty slim and it's hard to build customer loyalty. According to this analysis, Amazon should not be impatient to enter the health care industry, but will be the same as its decision to buy a whole eclipse, after years of strategic planning and testing to take the move. The analysis further points out that the mere sale of drugs to the general public will not be Amazon's expectations for its health care industry, its real goal should be to become so-called Drug Service Manager (pharmacy benefit manager; PBM). The reason is that in the health care system of the United States, PBM plays a very important intermediary role, which can be used for insurance companies and business management of their health insurance programs, but also the representative and pharmaceutical companies to negotiate drug prices. If Amazon were to become a successful PBM, it would be a very large and stable source of revenue for many consumers as long-term customers. At present, the largest 3 PBM in the United States is express Scripts, CVS and OptumRx, their total number of customers accounted for more than 80% of the total insured, the number of their customers in the tens of millions of-person spectrum. Amazon's ability to break into this market is certainly much more valuable than buying and selling a retail pharmacy brand. So what will Amazon do to achieve this? The analysis is thought to be one of the following 3 ways: one, buying a large PBM or an alliance analysis points out that although this is one of the options, it may be quite difficult to do so. Because to put a large PBM into its own, will inevitably encounter a lot of integration problems. In addition, the drug dispute when the smell, Amazon if the wrong target, I am afraid that will affect its long-standing established high customer satisfaction brand reputation. Second, looking for a small PBM collaboration to promote the health care system Innovation model the advantage of doing so is to help Amazon learn about the industry's knowledge and how it works, and to start with the cumulative experience of being a 350,000-person PBM. Third, to become a drug-mail service provider Amazon itself in E-commerce experience, so engaged in drug mail order service is certainly not difficult, especially now the United States insurance companies are increasingly want customers to obtain drugs through mail order to save costs. If Amazon does not plan to become PBM, this will be a very likely option.
