Cleveland Clinic and Amazon are partnering to provide primary care through a monthly subscription health care service and new medical facilities as research shows a decline in primary care access statewide.
Ensuring access to primary care is necessary, said Dr. James Gutierrez, chief of the hospital's primary care institute.
"Primary care is really essential to people effectively interfacing with the health care system," he said. "Primary care is the front door to the health care system, whether that's for an acute issue or a chronic medical problem."
This partnership, including the hiring of primary care doctors and other staff, comes as studies, including a 2024 Global Cleveland report, show declining numbers of primary care doctors. Researchers concluded this shortfall will lead to higher costs and decreased quality of care.
The monthly service, Amazon One Medical, provides patients access to online appointment booking, online prescription renewal requests, video medical visits and other services.
Patients can also get referrals to in-person visits at medical facilities staffed by doctors and nurses who will be hired and managed by Amazon. Cleveland Clinic and Amazon One Medical teams are planning to open the first Northeast Ohio facility later this year.
The intent is for the partnership to help the Clinic better reach its patients in Northeast Ohio, Gutierrez said.
“We have a very large primary care footprint in Northeast Ohio with Cleveland Clinic," he said. "But we still struggle with meeting the demands for our current patients and for new patients.”
Providing both virtual and in-person options is also a benefit, because it provides people with alternate channels to interact with primary care that best fits their needs, Gutierrez said.
But questions remain about what this long-term primary care model will look like, said Thomas Campanella, professor emeritus of health economics at Baldwin Wallace University.
"One of the challenges in that model is if they're saying (you're) getting in quickly, there's much more of a likelihood that you're going to see a different physician each time because [it's] who has the opening on the schedule," he said. "And so that defeats one of the values of primary care. It also becomes more almost like urgent care rather than a trusted primary care relationship."
That model could pose an issue of how thorough patient visits will be, Campanella said.
"Are they going to provide sufficient time with the patient, or is it more... a quick visit and then the next thing you know, you're off to a specialist?" he said. "Part of that trust and loyalty is sufficient time with the patient to be able to really get to know them."
