The partnership will provide free fertility and family building coverage to Amazon employees in 50 countries outside the U.S. and Canada.
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BY: ROSEMARY SCOTT
Amazon employees in 50 countries outside the U.S. and Canada will soon have access to free fertility and family-building services as part of a newly-formed partnership with Maven Clinic, the world’s largest virtual clinic for family and women’s health.
Amazon employees will have access to virtual appointments and referrals to local clinics and providers, including board-certified reproductive endocrinologists, obstetricians, gynecologists, nutritionists, mental health providers, adoption coaches and others. This coverage includes IVF, though neither Maven Clinic or Amazon could provide Inside Reproductive Health with specific information regarding how many IVF cycles are covered for each patient.
Coverage will extend to full-time, part-time and hourly Amazon employees in the following countries:
Europe: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Poland, Portugal, Norway, Republic of Serbia, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom
Asia / Pacific: Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam
Latin America: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru
Middle East and Africa: Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, United Arab Emirates
Maven Clinic was the first female-focused health start-up valued at over $1 billion and currently manages the care of over 17 million patients through partnerships with hundreds of other companies, including Fortune 500s such as Snap Inc. and Buzzfeed.
Still, as the world’s second-largest employer with over 1.5 million employees, this partnership with Amazon is a large undertaking for Maven. Amazon told Inside Reproductive Health that it chose Maven due to the company’s global presence and its flexible, digital-first approach that tailors coverage to each individual’s needs.
Neel Shah, Chief Medical Officer at Maven Clinic, told Inside Reproductive Health that one of the primary challenges of offering fertility services on a global scale is accessibility. Maven is able to work around this challenge by offering a digital first approach, in which each patient is matched with a “Care Advocate” employed by Maven who can meet virtually with patients to offer advice and referrals to the best providers and IVF clinics in the patient’s area.
In some places, Shah said, this is easier than others. For example, he said that in the U.K., there is ample third-party data available in which Maven can determine the quality of each clinic and recommend the best option to their patients. In other countries, he said, that data isn’t available, so Maven has to perform its own vetting process.
Ultimately, each patient’s care is up to them, and their needs will vary based on their physical locations and reproductive journeys. There are about 4,000 clinics in Maven’s global referral network, but if a patient wants to visit a clinic not recommended by their Care Advocate, “We don’t tell people that they can’t go somewhere,” Shah said.
Since 2019, Amazon employees in the U.S. and Canada have had reproductive health coverage through Progyny, which has served more than 30,000 Amazon employees since the partnership began.
Though Progyny was founded in 2008, its larger success began after a rebrand in 2016 and an IPO in 2019. Before Amazon’s partnership with Progyny in 2019, the company’s reproductive health benefits were bundled with its larger benefits package as confirmed by Brad Senstra, CEO of ReproTech and former executive director of Seattle Reproductive Medicine.
Senstra told Inside Reproductive Health that before 2016, it was much less common for employers in the U.S. to offer fertility benefits, and those that did provide coverage put a cap on how much employees could spend on their treatment, ultimately resulting in lower success rates for patients and higher costs for employers.
Senstra said that Amazon’s decision to partner with Progyny for its reproductive health coverage in 2019 was likely due to Progyny’s unique benefit structure that did not put a cap on coverage.
Only time will tell if Maven Clinic’s partnership with Amazon will have a similar butterfly effect outside the U.S. In the meantime, Shah said, Maven’s goal is simple: “to provide the best possible care to as many Amazonians as possible.”
The themes reported in this publication are those of the news. They do not reflect the views of Inside Reproductive Health, nor of the Advertiser
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