Since conquering the e-commerce realm, Amazon has gotten into seemingly every industry imaginable—and healthcare is no exception.

Amazon has slowly inched into healthcare since its $750 million purchase of online pharmacy startup Pillpack in 2018, after which the company rolled out the now-defunct telehealth service Amazon Care in 2019. Then the tech giant started Amazon Pharmacy in 2020, along with several new offerings under the segment in the years since, such as RxPass, a $5 monthly subscription for unlimited generic drugs.

At the beginning of 2022, Amazon veteran John Love was named VP of Amazon Pharmacy and Pillpack, and he has been tasked with overseeing all of the company’s pharmacy operations. Love has been with Amazon since 2006 and has worked in several departments, including consumer electronics and music.

In his new role, Love oversees all of Amazon Pharmacy’s clinical teams and forms partnerships between Amazon and payers, drugmakers, employers, providers, and health systems. Love told Healthcare Brew that, through Amazon Pharmacy, he’s trying to make the pharmacy experience cheaper and more convenient.

Keep reading here.—MA

Do you work in healthcare or have information about the industry that we should know? Email Maia at [email protected]. For confidential conversations, ask Maia for her number on Signal.

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Direct care workers at Catholic Health’s Mercy Hospital in Rockville Centre, New York, won an 18% wage increase over the next three years—along with other benefit improvements—in their new contract on October 20.

The contract, which was “overwhelmingly approved,” secured “increases to night and evening differentials, a larger uniform allowance, and additional pay for designated caregivers who provide training to other staff,” according to 1199SEIU, the union that represents about 500 workers at Mercy.

“The pay increases we fought for and won are substantial. A lot of us have been working overtime or two jobs to survive,” Dawn Naughton, a dietary aide at Mercy for 15 years, said in a statement. “I did the calculations, and they are going to make a big difference in my life.”

Keep reading here.—AE

Do you work in healthcare or have information about the industry that we should know? Email Amanda at [email protected]. For confidential conversations, ask Amanda for her number on Signal.

It seems like everyone and their uncle wants to get their hands on GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic for weight loss. But these medications may also come with an increased risk for severe gastrointestinal problems, according to a new study.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) found that patients taking GLP-1 drugs had a higher likelihood of developing stomach paralysis, pancreatitis, and bowel obstruction compared to individuals using bupropion-naltrexone, another weight loss medication. The research, published on October 5, is the first large epidemiological study to focus on gastrointestinal issues in nondiabetic patients who use these medications for weight loss.

“There have been anecdotal reports of some patients using these drugs for weight loss and then presenting with repeated episodes of nausea and vomiting secondary to a condition referred to as gastroparesis,” Mahyar Etminan, the study’s senior author and an epidemiologist and ophthalmology and visual sciences professor at the UBC Faculty of Medicine, said in a statement. “But until now, there hasn’t been any data from large epidemiologic studies.”

Keep reading here.—KW

Do you work in healthcare or have information about the industry that we should know? Email Kristine at [email protected]. For confidential conversations, ask Kristine for her number on Signal.

Today’s top healthcare reads.

Stat: There were nearly 2,000 violent attacks on healthcare facilities globally in 2022. (NBC News)

Quote: “You can see this ballooning completely out of control.”—Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, on the effect of rising GLP-1s costs on healthcare spending (the New York Times)

Read: Researchers are beginning to study the connection between long Covid and menopause. (Stat News)

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