As health insurers and retailers focus on meeting patients’ demands to have access to healthcare when they want it, how they want it, telehealth acquisitions and expansions are going strong, Managed Healthcare Executive reports.
Among the deals announced this spring were Cigna’s acquisition of MDLive, Bright Health’s acquisition of Zipnosis and Walmart’s announcement that it was planning to purchase MeMD. Meanwhile, Amazon, which has been offering telehealth services to some of its own employees, said it would start to offer virtual care nationwide and signed its first deal this spring to provide its Amazon Care telehealth app to another company.
The dealmaking is just one of the business-related symptoms of the surge of telehealth usage that started with the COVID-19 pandemic last year and has continued at a pace not seen in prior years. Telehealth “needed a jolt. The jolt was the pandemic to really get adherence and adoption,” says Nick Donkar, U.S. health services deals sector leader at the consultancy PwC. Read more.
