Besides being launched by Amazon alumni, General Medicine has close business ties to a senior Amazon health exec
Excerpt – 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.
[..] General Medicine is focused on serving patients directly. It offers elements of both of Amazon’s pathways to patients — allowing them to pay cash for a quick visit for pink eye, or to enter their insurance information and pay the copay for the same care. Like One Medical’s primary care offering, it facilitates referrals to labs and specialists when a patient needs care outside the practice, though without a subscription up front.
And its storefront, in some ways, resembles Amazon Pharmacy, which launched in 2020. That’s no surprise given its developers, PillPack founders TJ Parker and Elliot Cohen, who left Amazon in 2022 four years after the acquisition, and Ashwin Muralidharan, who until May was technical advisor and chief of staff to Amazon Health Services’ Lindsay. Parker’s Matrix Partners led General Medicine’s funding, while co-founders Cohen and Muralidharan will serve as executive chair and CEO, respectively.
“TJ and Elliot have been fixated on the idea of making healthcare shoppable since the early days of PillPack. While at Amazon, their team built and launched Amazon Pharmacy and Clinic, and shaped Amazon health’s strategy,” said a General Medicine spokesperson. “Today they maintain a positive and collaborative relationship with key stakeholders.”
Amazon Pharmacy allows users to see the cost of medications in real time as they shop by entering their insurance information. General Medicine does the same for some health care services, showing patients estimated copays for telehealth visits or estimated costs for external lab work and imaging with different providers after they input insurance information. Outside of pharmacy lookup, Amazon has built a tool for users to check their insurance coverage for a growing list of “health condition programs” for diabetes management, therapy, and virtual urgent care.
Exposing actual health care prices has been a sticking point for many digital care companies. “This is the same fundamental problem that has been a huge barrier to this in the past,” said Lennox-Miller: “Figuring out the price of something in healthcare is really, really hard.”
In a 2023 interview with STAT, Mishra spoke about how Amazon was trying to crack that code for patients.
“When people go to solve their problem, they don’t have, oftentimes, the information they need to know what’s the best place to get this done. How do I differentiate between my options A, B, and C?” Mishra said. “In a very Amazonian way, we’re trying to find ways to give customers information that will be useful for them as they make those choices, and cost is definitely one of them.”
Full article, K Palmer, STAT, 2025.5.28