June 11, 2021: -Amazon has attracted multiple companies interested in using its telehealth service, known as Amazon Care, company executive Babak Parviz said on Wednesday.

“We’ve had quite a bit of interest from other companies in using this service,” Parviz, a vice president working on Amazon Care, said at The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Health virtual event. Parviz added that Amazon is planning to announce which companies have signed on to use the service later this summer.

Shares of Teladoc Health, a significant telemedicine provider, slid 1.6% following the news.

Amazon Care launched in the year 2019 as a pilot program for employees in and around the company’s Seattle headquarters. The service provides virtual urgent care visits and free telehealth consults, and in-home visits for a fee from nurses for testing and vaccinations.

Amazon announced in March that it would expand the virtual care part of the program nationally for its employees and other companies starting this summer. To begin, the added in-person services will only be offered in Washington state and metro areas, which include Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

The company is working to make the Amazon Care service available to other geographies “as fast as we can,” Parviz said. Amazon is eyeing which brings the service to rural areas in the future, he further said.

To reach that scale, Amazon will have to hire more than a thousand employees, Parviz said.

Amazon has long set its sights on disrupting the healthcare industry. In addition to Amazon Care, the company last launched Amazon Pharmacy, an online prescription fulfillment service, which built on its acquisition of PillPack in 2018.

In the previous year, Amazon partnered with employee health provider Crossover Health to launch the neighborhood health clinics for warehouse workers and their families in a handful of cities.

Amazon helped launch a joint venture with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan to improve employer health programs. She called Haven, the experience disbanded in the early year 2021, as a sign of how difficult it may be to tackle challenges in American health care.