As Big Tech races to dress its AI in scrubs, Amazon has a key advantage: It already owns hundreds of clinics staffed by human doctors.

Like some of its industry peers, the shopping and cloud giant has been rolling out a series of new AI-powered tools for providers and patients alike in recent weeks. Unlike competitors such as Microsoft and Google, however, these features are built around a real-world primary clinic network, One Medical, which Amazon bought in 2023.

“Ours is the only solution that is connected in the same app to an actual clinical delivery network,” Andrew Diamond, chief medical officer at Amazon One Medical, told us.

Amazon is counting on this acquisition, as well as its physical distribution network and its overall cloud dominance, to give it an edge when integrating the latest AI technology into healthcare. As part of an ongoing series on Big Tech’s race into the healthcare industry, we took a look at what sets Amazon’s strategy apart.

See the latest installment in our series here.—PK

In an industry meant to shape people’s lives for the better, some people go to a hospital room and others go to an office. Amy Compton-Phillips has done both.

The now chief medical officer at CVS Health started her career as an internist at Oakland, California-based health system Kaiser Permanente.

“I always wanted to be a doctor,” she told Healthcare Brew. “It was my calling.”

Compton-Phillips worked at Kaiser for 22 years, moving her way up to service chief for the department of internal medicine and running a medical office. Eventually, she ended her time there as chief quality officer at leadership and consulting organization the Permanente Federation and physician director of population care, which works to improve care quality.

“As a primary care doctor, I could take care of a person sitting directly in front of me,” she said. But by going on the leadership track, she felt like she could “make little changes that could make lives better” for thousands of patients.

Find more on her day-to-day here.—CM

Last year saw the creation and success of the first-ever personalized CRISPR gene-editing therapy. This year, the FDA wants to make it easier to create and market treatments like this for ultra-rare diseases.

On Dec. 4, the agency cut the default number of required clinical trials for approval from two to one. On Feb. 23, it released draft guidance outlining how individualized therapies for ultra-rare diseases can get approval through current pathways. The new guidance—dubbed the plausible mechanism framework—says that a clinical trial with just one participant whose symptoms significantly improve could be enough.

Experts told Healthcare Brew the traditional approval pathway wasn’t built for drugs that treat ultra-rare diseases, which affect so few patients—fewer than 1 in 50,000, according to some researchers’ definitions—and that a large clinical trial sometimes doesn’t make practical or financial sense. These FDA moves could inspire more innovation in the pharmaceutical industry, they say, particularly the struggling gene therapy market that has seen less investor interest over the last few years compared to trendier drugs like GLP-1s. But this new pathway still needs guaranteed guardrails.

Here’s what biotechs are banking on.—CC

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