Amazon Could Be Building Clinics for Its Employees

According to sources familiar with the situation, e-commerce giant Amazon is considering building clinics for its employees.

Two people familiar with the matter have said that Amazon is in internal talks to open primary care clinics at its main office in Seattle.

The initial plan is to hire a smaller number of doctors that will start a pilot clinic late in the year for a select group of employees and then expand it to more workers in early 2019.

While Amazon declined to comment on the topic, health investor at Comcast Ventures, Michael Yang, remarked that the move could be to create a prototype before expanding it outside of the employee base.

Yang said that Amazon has tested ideas on its own workers before expanding them out, such as Amazon Go, a small grocery in Seattle that lets shoppers put items in their bag and not have to wait in line.

Yang has touched on the question though of whether or not Amazon would move the prototype to thousands of its warehouse workers.

“Dropping a package on your foot or throwing out your back after manual labor is a very different set of issues from the employee working at headquarters,” Yang explained.

Disclaimer: We have no position in Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) and have not been compensated for this article.