American Well Case Writeup

American Well, a pioneer in online healthcare is at the crucial stage where the business opportunities look propitious at the same time it could make the company lose its perspective. It has the first-mover advantage with strong core competency. But still, some of the questions concerning the future of the company do needs to be addressed. Some of the main questions that American Well faces are 1. Introducing the product to new customer segments 2. Capturing the international market 3. Pushing the products beyond health care industry.
American well is currently serving the connectivity between patients and physicians. The new product “Team Edition” will serve the connectivity between primary care physicians (PCPs) and the specialist. They are also considering the prospect of online health care to Hospitals, Retail clinics and Pharmacies. The adverse effect is it could be too soon for American Well to launch a new undertaking, given their core services has not yet been adopted widely. Furthermore, this requires new hiring and additional funding. Stepping back has its own drawback of failing to capture the opportunity when there was demand.
Meeting real-time excess demand with real-time excess capacity is a whole new world to be explored not only in health care but in many other industries. Also, the need for online health care has a great demand oversees too and American Well can explore its business in these new countries and can become a world leader in delivering virtual healthcare services in a many-to-many platform. Even though it is true that American Well has all the ideas and advantages – the main disadvantage is the lack of infrastructure and the awareness of an internet-based health service.

There is still a lot of opportunities and work needed to be done with its present venture and stepping big foot too soon cannot be as beneficial for the company as it sounds. The “Team Edition” is an innovative product and the American Well should concentrate on its existing customer base i. e. the payers. They should probably do extensive market research on all these new opportunities. A research team could be formed including members from American Well and personnel from top insurance companies to explore the scope of extending its services to hospitals and pharmacies.
They should wait for the “spending freezes” to be over and need to analyze on how the new health reforms will affect the existing organization. Another conceivable strategy could be a hybrid of Direct-To-Customer model and Business-To-Business model. American Well can establish a DTC model where they would directly sign up patients and doctors to a nationwide system along with their existing B2B model. This will cover more customer base. The short term goal