New e-commerce channels especially for high-growth healthcare products and services sector are rapidly evolving as indicated by Walmart and Amazon among a larger pipeline of retailer-to-healthcare providers that has grown in the last few years. Pharmacy chains such as CVS and Walgreens are a few others that have greatly invested in becoming primary care providers. Amazon in particular has made significant moves forward toward becoming a key player in the healthcare industry, inspire of the fact withdrawing “Amazon Care” in late 2022, it came back in early 2023 and bought out One Medical for almost $4 billion. Meanwhile Walmart has also made progress toward becoming a major provider in this market, launching brick-and-mortar clinics across American with the objective of becoming the “neighborhood health destination”, with plans to add 28 new locations in 2024, and in talks to purchase a majority stake in ChenMed, a primary care provider. Providing the backbone of such enterprises are healthcare e-commerce platforms such as NextPlat Corp, which is helping to popularize virtual healthcare and which could result in the majority of the population preferring to access all the healthcare services and products that they need via the internet. Noteworthy is Cue Health’s presence in the Telehealth and healthcare e-commerce with its Cue Care and Cue Pharmacy. A buy-out candidate for one of these large retailers?
