Amwell is driving ahead with its vision of becoming a platform of platforms with its Converge initiative with clients — most notably CVS Health — as the company moves aggressively to become a dominant player in the space in what it called a “transitional time.”
On a second quarter earnings call on Thursday (Aug. 4), Amwell CEO Ido Schoenberg led with the CVS partnership, saying the telehealth platform would be powering its new virtual care offering.
CVS announced plans to roll offering last quarter. More recently, it said it was looking to purchase a primary-care provider before the year was out, but it had remained tight-lipped about the tech platform that would function as what Schoenberg called “the front door” for what will eventually become a comprehensive set of services ranging from pharmacy to primary to virtual urgent care visits and long-term treatment of chronic conditions.
The Amwell CEO was similarly reticent about details on the pact during the question-and-answer session with analysts. He did call CVS “a fascinating organization that blends insurance capabilities, retail capabilities, care delivery networks, PBM, population management services, and so much more.”
The CVS-Amwell virtual primary care product is expected to debut in the first half of 2023.
In more routine news, Schoenberg said visits on Converge held at 9% of total visits for the Amwell platform overall, which he called “reasonable and expected as we shift our focus to more complex sizeable Converge customer migrations, which naturally take longer.”
Touting its vision for Converge as an ecosystem that will support third-party telehealth modules and related applications, Schoenberg said “we continue to extend and enhance the platform as a standalone connective infrastructure powering a seamless and elegant experience.”
Giving an example of Converge functionality, he said, “with Converge, we enable an EHR direct invite which requires no logins or passwords and no waiting room for patients. In a single motion, a clinician simply opens an instance within the EHR, texts the patient a link, conducts the consult and documents the visit.”
That dovetails with the company’s new Next Patient feature allowing available physicians and clinicians to accept patients without appointments from a queue “directly in their EMR or their provider portable, blending clinical networks to increase patient access and maximize revenue. Patients entering via a provider or health portal “are automatically matched with the next available provider creating shorter wait times and an optimal patient experience,” he said.
He said “we are evolving our platform to help our customers make the transition from transactional healthcare to continuous self-care. Our aim is to empower customers to achieve important ROI benefits while delivering their organizations into the future of digital healthcare.”
Reporting Q2 revenues of $64.5 million, 7% higher than the comparable quarter last year, Chief Financial Officer Robert Shepardson said total visits were 1.5 million in Q2, or 19% higher than Q2 2021. He said scheduled visits increased 20% year over year “and represented 73% of visit volume, about even with the first quarter and up from approximately 30% pre COVID.”
Shepardson said subscription revenue increased 10% over a year ago to $29.6 million, which he called “fairly flat compared to Q1,” adding that “Our long-term profitability is grounded in our plan to drive high margin subscription revenue growth at a rate that is faster than that of our overall business.”
When pressed by one analyst about Amazon Care and the ecommerce giant’s moves into the space, Schoenberg said, “In some ways it’s another validation of what we said all along that technology will transform healthcare. We see movement by Amazon as a very strong accelerant to many of our customers who can use our platform in order to survive and flourish in a marketplace that is becoming incredibly more sophisticated and more competitive to them.”