By Sebastian Herrera and Kimberly Chin 

A high-profile health-care venture launched by three of the world's biggest and best-known companies -- Amazon.com Inc., Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. -- is folding two years after its founding, the company said Monday.

Haven Health, originally sparked by an idea from JPMorgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon, sought to reduce health-care costs for hundreds of thousands of workers at the three companies by pooling resources and technology. Haven's stated aim at its 2018 launch was to provide transparent health care for employees of the companies at lower costs.

It plans to cease operations in February without having achieved those aims.

"The Haven team made good progress exploring a wide range of health-care solutions, as well as piloting new ways to make primary care easier to access, insurance benefits simpler to understand and easier to use and prescription drugs more affordable," a spokeswoman said. The three companies will be able to use what they learned and collaborate informally in the future, she said.

Writer and physician Atul Gawande was named Haven's chief executive, but he stepped down in May. Turnover at the joint venture was a problem almost from its outset, according to people familiar with the matter. Other executive departures besides Dr. Gawande included technology chief Serkan Kutan and operating chief Jack Stoddard.

Haven sought to develop new ways to improve access to primary care, simplify insurance coverage and make prescription drugs more affordable, the company said.

Amazon, which has more than 800,000 employees in the U.S. and hired 400,000 over the past year, has long pursued its own health-care ambitions and has had teams working separately on issues that Haven tackled.

The tech giant prizes its "fast fail" culture aimed at quick innovation and often assigns separate teams to work on similar projects simultaneously. It typically operates as a network of small units under one umbrella rather than with centralized planning, according to current and former Amazon employees.

Amazon launched an online pharmacy in November that will ship insulin, asthma inhalers and other common generic or branded medications. The pharmacy won't sell opioids or other drugs deemed at higher risk of theft, and customers will need prescriptions for their medications. Amazon said it would accept most insurance and offer discounts to Prime customers who don't have insurance. An Amazon spokeswoman said at the time that "the same teams, technology, and infrastructure that support PillPack by Amazon Pharmacy have expanded to serve a wider range of customers, both in terms of needs and numbers."

Amazon introduced its pharmacy about two years after buying online pharmacy PillPack Inc. Previously, Amazon customers had been directed to a separate site geared toward patients with complex, chronic medical conditions.

In 2019, Amazon launched a virtual primary-care clinic for its Seattle employees dubbed Amazon Care, which offers to dispatch mobile nurses to employees' homes.

Amazon spent billions of dollars in 2020 to set up testing sites at its warehouses to screen workers for Covid-19. The company said late last year that it would be conducting roughly 50,000 tests daily by November. Amazon has also lobbied the federal government to give its front-line employees priority access to coronavirus vaccines as the shots begin to roll out.

Write to Sebastian Herrera at Sebastian.Herrera@wsj.com and Kimberly Chin at kimberly.chin@wsj.com

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 04, 2021 14:48 ET (19:48 GMT)

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