Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan Chase, Amazon Team Up

Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan Chase and Co. have unveiled plans to revolutionize healthcare, while also improving employee satisfaction, and reducing overall costs.

Basically, the two companies are partnering with Amazon on ways to address healthcare for their US employees. The three giants will bring their scale and complementary expertise to this long-term effort, via an independent company that will be free from profit-making incentives and constraints.

The initial focus of this new company will be on technology solutions that provide US employees and their families with simplified, high-quality, and transparent healthcare at a reasonable cost.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO:

“The healthcare system is complex, and we enter into this challenge open-eyed about the degree of difficulty. Hard as it might be, reducing healthcare’s burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort. Success is going to require talented experts, a beginner’s mind, and a long-term orientation.”

Basically, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are forming a group that can help their collective employees base, and help them better face rising healthcare costs.

Health expenditures are not only daunting now, but are set to rise steeply through 2025, according to projections from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. With national health spending in the US expected to grow at an average rate of 5.6% from 2016 to 2025.

This is 1.2% faster than the GDP for this span.

But you can be sure that this new health venture will, in all likelihood, turn out to be a boon for AWS, the Amazon cloud division. AWS will serve as the technology backbone of this new venture.

The aim may be to disrupt the healthcare industry and make it more affordable. And to accomplish that, a good bit of Amazon Web Services technology will be at the center. Including healthy doses of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data services — all of which will be in the mix.

And the fact that the AWS platform is compliant with the various healthcare privacy regulations is something that will help it get things up and running with this gigantic new venture.

For Amazon, though, this will serve as an excellent test bed for healthcare as an industry, just as the company is getting ready to explore this side of the market.