PillPack Founders to Exit Roles After Amazon Pharmacy Regroup

Amazon executives TJ Parker and Elliot Cohen, who were instrumental in pushing the eCommerce titan more into health care, are now leaving the company, CNBC wrote Monday (Sept. 19).

After Amazon bought PillPack in 2018 for $750 million, the two, who founded the company in 2013, helped roll out Amazon Pharmacy, the online source for delivering prescription medications. They were vice presidents of pharmacy until recently when they were shifted more to consulting roles.

“I’m writing to let you all know that Elliot and I are moving on from PillPack and Amazon at the end of the month,” Parker wrote. “Out of everything, it’s the people that we met along the way and that joined us on this journey that we’ll remember most fondly, and we’ll miss you all.”

Parker and Cohen met in pharmacy school in Boston, and PillPack began serving customers in 2014.

Amazon, meanwhile, had been looking to get more into healthcare in recent years. But its pharmacy business had struggled to get off the ground. Amazon also recently said it would be shuttering its Amazon Care telehealth offering, saying it hadn’t been a “complete enough” offering.

The company has also changed up the leadership of its health operations, with the elevation of ex-Prime boss Neil Lindsay to lead the health efforts.

It all comes as Amazon has taken a new direction for healthcare, having bought One Medical for $3.9 billion earlier in the year, which will give it a new network of primary care clinics in the U.S.

Read more: Amazon’s One Medical Acquisition Investigated by FTC

But that deal has now come under scrutiny by the Federal Trade Commission, with chairwoman Lina Khan having said in the past that Amazon’s expansion into things beyond eCommerce could allow it to undercut rivals through collecting data.

The bid was the first major acquisition the company underwent under new CEO Andy Jassy, who has been vocal about wanting to expand more into healthcare.