An Amazon exec said ‘competition is a good thing’ as the company pushes into the health space

• Amazon’s VP overseeing some healthcare efforts said he welcomes competition in the sector.
• The e-commerce and cloud giant has major ambitions in the healthcare space.
• The comments come as Amazon faces antitrust scrutiny.
• See more stories on Insider’s business page.

Amazon’s vice president overseeing some of its healthcare efforts said the tech giant belongs in the health space, as every sector needs competition from large, medium, and small-sized companies.

Babak Parviz, vice president at Amazon who was also credited with creating Google Glass, said at the Wall Street Journal Tech Health conference that the company is pushing into the health space to improve the US health system using the company’s expertise.

Parviz added that Amazon is being respectful of larger players and health systems established in the space, though he does not want to see only a handful of dominant players.

“What we don’t want to see is a handful of big entities, big companies, big healthcare systems dominating a sector,” Parviz said at the conference. “So a healthy sector will have large companies, many mid-sized companies, and many, many startup companies.”

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Parviz’s comments come weeks after Washington, DC, Attorney General Karl Racine filed a lawsuit accusing Amazon of stifling competition for third-party sellers on its marketplace. The Federal Trade Commission is reportedly investigating whether Amazon violated antitrust laws by collecting third-party seller data to create or favor their own similar products.

The e-commerce giant launched Amazon Care, an online and in-person primary care service for employees, in 2019. Amazon intends to sell the service to businesses, Insider first reported, which Parviz confirmed during the WSJ conference by saying he will announce the multiple companies that elected to use Amazon Care “in the coming months.”

Other tech behemoths, including Google and Microsoft, have released products targeted at clinicians and health systems over the last several years.

Parviz said Amazon welcomes the competition from “many other contributors” within healthcare.

“I think competition is a good thing, I hope to to see more and more of it in any sector,” he said.

Amazon was not immediately available for additional comment.