Amazon plans to increase its same-day prescription delivery service to 20 more cities in 2025 which is another milestone in the health-care expansion goals of the e-commerce company. The move will help next-day delivery of medications across nearly half of America. The company says it will continue to make prescriptions for American residents more accessible.
The company announced it at a press event held at one of its warehouses near Nashville, Tennessee. The company said that it will open pharmacies inside the same-day delivery facilities located in major metropolitan areas. In its earlier rollout, Amazon launched its same-day pharmacy delivery in March 2023 in New York and Los Angeles and also in cities like Indianapolis, Miami, Phoenix, Seattle, and Austin, Texas.
The cities that will be included in the 2025 expansion are Boston, Dallas, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and San Diego. The company has announced that it is dedicated to accelerating medication delivery. An example of such flexibility is that prescriptions can be delivered up to 10 p.m. if ordered before 4 p.m. Such a facility comes through Amazon Pharmacy, whereby patients can place orders for drugs on either the Amazon website or app, which, again, enables free deliveries for Prime users.
The service, Amazon Pharmacy is one of the new plays by the company which was launched last year, a year after it acquired the online pharmacy PillPack in 2018. It would not disclose how many customers it has, though said in January that its customer count had doubled over the past year. Under this competitive landscape, the company competes against old pharmacy chains such as CVS and Walgreens and big retailers, including Walmart. However, Amazon recently started attacking the growing concern over the pharmacy desert as increasingly sprouting across the U.S. where pharmacy services and drugs are significantly unavailable. At a time when the old chains have closed hundreds of locations recently and have issues with profitability, Amazon tries to fill these care gaps.
This is one of the few initiatives by Amazon aimed at making deep strides into the healthcare market, following the recent acquisition of a $3.9 billion primary care provider known as One Medical in July 2022, besides other health initiatives.
