I have had the unique opportunity to be involved in shepherding members of my family through a maze of healthcare delivery systems. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to Amazon to gain a presence in this industry.
The system that clearly doesn't exist and should is a secured link between medical prescribers and pharmacy inventories. If I were Jeff Bezos I would get busy readying my M&A people to purchase Caremark. CVS is, to my knowledge, the most thorough and extensive business that handles the delivery of pharmaceuticals. But they also deliver other services, like roadside assistance. Strategically, Amazon has the most to gain by extending their ability to coordinate and deliver more services. So sentimentality aside, Walgreens name recognition might work better for the short term, and lord knows they need a makeover, but Caremark is a better target. As for Right-Aid, there's a bit too much overlap with Whole Foods. So Caremark.
I learned a long time ago that delivery and inventory controls were a very significant part of the value of Philip Morris profitability. In exchange for signage in convenience stores, they offered free point of sale systems. Those systems in a coordinated fashion allowed the tobacco giant to figure out how much of their product was leaving retail. Since they knew how much they were producing on the manufacturing end, they could estimate how much was in transit and inventory in the part of the supply chain they did not control, logistics and transportation. The competitor there was McLane Logistics. PM was able to figure out how much inventory to sell the McLane and squeeze inefficiencies out of their delivery system.
This is something that is clearly not done in the pharmaceutical business, and whomever gets there first will have a huge leg up. There are few things more nerve wracking for patients than to have a prescription on hand and not be able to fill it in a timely manner. That doctors and pharmacies depend on office hours and phone calls is absolutely ridiculous.
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