What will JPMorgan's health care future look like? Here are 3 possible scenarios.

By Sarah Hostetter, Vidal Seegobin, and Natalie Trebes

Close on the heels of Amazon's acquisition of One Medical comes a move by another member of the group that formerly comprised Haven—so it's easy to assume parallels between the two announcements. At some level, there are similarities in Amazon's and JPMorgan's approach: They both began with employee-focused primary care and partnered with a national care delivery company that would eventually allow for scale. But the similarities stop there.

To make sense of JPMorgan's ambitions, we need to wind the tape back a little. Earlier this year, Vera Whole Health, a value-based primary care provider, acquired Castlight Health, a consumer navigation platform. JPMorgan (via Morgan Health) was an investor in this transaction, and Central Ohio Primary Care (COPC) was a one of their strategic partners. So these three organizations—JPMorgan, Vera, and COPC—had a relationship prior to the news of this employee-centered product.

The focuses of these three entities are well-aligned around improving the value of health care and reducing the total cost of care for employee populations. In fact, Morgan Health's mission is centered around "improving the quality, equity, and affordability of employer-sponsored health care." A natural conclusion of the partnership brokered earlier this year is exactly what we just saw: offering primary care to JPMorgan 's employees.

We see three possible scenarios for JPMorgan's next steps and their impact on the industry:

1. JPMorgan focuses on improving the value and affordability of care for their employees: JPMorgan employs almost 300,000 people across multiple geographies, so at a minimum, bringing this to scale for their employees would reduce costs. But beyond that, it could open partnership opportunities for other value-based care-focused independent medical groups in locations—such as the New York City area—where the firm has a large employee population. It could also set a model for other large employers to focus on primary care partnerships—perhaps shifting some of the attention from center-of-excellence models.
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3. Morgan Health launches a direct-to-employer offering beyond its own employees: JPMorgan could be using their own employees as a testing ground to perfect a wider employer offering. Being able to bring navigation, virtual care, and in-person care delivery into a seamless product—and show proven results on total cost of care—is a product that would play well in this employer-driven market. This would bring another closed network model for incumbents to either work with or lose volumes to.
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5. Morgan Heath sets its sights on broader industry transformation: Unlike Amazon, JPMorgan has been consistent with their focus on health care and has the capital and knowledge to try to disrupt the industry more broadly. We think the group of players they have brought together has a lot of potential to successfully manage benefit costs. However, there are significant barriers to this type of transformation—which is why no one player has yet been successful. For example, one of the necessary ingredients for this type of transformation will be finding enough like-minded physician practice partnerships—in a marketplace that's in heavy competition for physician talent.

Each of these three scenarios build upon each other—you must master 1 to get to 2 and so on. The outstanding question is how lofty are JPMorgan's ambitions and whether they can overcome the unique barriers at each level?