STAT+: PillPack founders’ new health care marketplace has deep roots with Amazon
General Medicine, launched by three former Amazon employees has a business model that could compete with Amazon’s One Medical.
A new digital health care marketplace, launched last week, has a good amount of Amazon in its DNA. General Medicine, with $32 million in funding, came out of stealth with three former Amazon employees as co-founders and investors, a business model that could compete with Amazon’s One Medical — and behind the scenes, a current senior Amazon executive.
The former employees, including the founders of PillPack — the pharmacy company that Amazon bought in 2018 for about $750 million and grew into Amazon Pharmacy — bill General Medicine as a “one-stop shop for expert care” that connects patients to its own telehealth medical practices and to outside care. Sunita Mishra, Amazon Health Services’ chief medical officer, is the physician owner of one of those practices and advised the company early on, General Medicine and Mishra confirmed.
Like most telehealth companies, General Medicine works with separate medical practices that must be owned by a licensed physician. Mishra, who has been at Amazon since 2020 after serving as an executive at Providence St. Joseph Health, maintains licenses in more than 20 states. General Medicine said it had started the process of transferring ownership of all its medical practices to its other physician owner, Pallabi Sanyal-Dey, before the company launched.
