JPMorgan Chase, Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway work on improving health care

JPMorgan Chase, Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway have teamed up to develop a health care delivery system that is high quality and low cost.

Dr. David Hanekom, CEO of Arizona Care Network, says it started with the desire to have a stronger role in guaranteeing the health of their employees. If their employees were healthy, then they wouldn’t be absent from work and they would work at a higher efficiency. The companies are combining their technology and expertise to solve the quality and price situation.

“Amazon is good at predicting purchase behavior,” Hanekom says. “If they use that same technology to predict health care purchasing behavior, they can, through their technology and through their benefit design, steer patients to high quality, low cost providers.”

Hanekom doesn’t believe that lowering health care costs will come back to harm the companies in the future. He points out that in every five dollars spent in America is directed toward health care.

“Health care costs are probably the number one reason American companies are finding it hard to compete and why so many jobs have been shipped overseas,” Hanekom says. “It will disrupt the very comfortable mechanisms that are already in place by multiple middlemen who are all making a profit and providing a service.”

The big corporations aren’t the only ones who can benefit from this. Smaller businesses will benefit just as much. Hanekom says in his own company, they’ve been able to lower the costs and improve the quality for a few thousand employees. It has to do with the delivery system and not working with through a third party.

“The combined assets of Hathaway, which is an insurance finance area; JPMorgan, which understands finance; and Amazon, that understands shopping behavior, targeting specific products. Those three together you can have something truly amazing,” says Hanekom.