It’s tempting to see Haven as another casualty of entrenched interests in American medicine. But the endeavor, however ambitious, also collided with the equally unmovable aims of Amazon, whose sweeping campaign to disrupt health care began long before it formed Haven with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase in 2018.
Amazon beat Haven to the punch on one of its core initiatives, an effort to develop a digital product to streamline access to primary care and prescriptions for employees. Even though Amazon Care was initially confined to Amazon office workers in Seattle, its launch in September 2019 blindsided several rank-and-file employees at the startup who were struck by similarities to the product they had been building.
Amazon “clearly won out,” said one former Haven staffer, who described the primary care platform as Haven’s most “coveted project.” The overlap was not enough to quash the initiative, but it was the start of a steady unraveling that culminated this week in the announcement that Haven would shut its doors in February, having never launched a single commercial product.
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