One of the great advances in the post-coronavirus society we live in today is telemedicine, the field in which we can see a doctor without going to the doctor's office. This proved welcome for doctors who didn't want to expose themselves to coronavirus, yet needed to actually come in contact with patients to have a practice. Telemedicine is helping to smooth out the interactions between doctor and patient in the age of COVID, and Amwell (NYSE:AMWL) just made its debut to a fairly happy Wall Street.
The Doctor Will See You Online
Right from the beginning, Amwell rolled out big. The initial public offering (IPO) price called for shares to go at $18, but the stock actually opened at $25. By the time the market closed, shares had hit $25.54, though in after-hours trading, they gave back some of those gains. Still, as of this writing, the share price was still well above the originally-expected $18.
Amwell, though only recently launched as a stock, currently serves as one of the biggest telemedicine operations out there, and currently competes with Teladoc (NYSE:TDOC), who recently merged with Livongo (NASDAQ:LVGO) to give it an extra advantage in the field. Amwell focuses mainly on providing services to healthcare providers that allow them to more rapidly, and more simply, set up a telemedicine presence to better address the need healthcare providers have.
Amwell's numbers provide an exciting potential future; for the first six months of 2020, the company brought in revenue of $122.3 million. That's up nearly double—77%—from the same time in 2019, when the company brought in $69.1 million. Despite the impressive revenue, and the impressive revenue gains, the company still declared a net loss of $113.4 million, which is nearly triple the net loss seen in 2019's first six months of $41.6 million.
Amwell, and Its Market, Are Both Still Early-Stage Prospects
Though Amwell has been around for quite some time—and to a certain degree so has telemedicine—it's a vital point of the market to note that it's still young. The pandemic has lit a fire under certain key points of development, but this is still, for most, a very new way to practice.
Tools like Amwell, and by extension Teladoc, will help narrow the gap still further by providing the necessary telemedicine infrastructure to bridge the gap. As the tools are increasingly used, and the early adopters start spreading the word about how well the systems work, it's a safe bet that more and more end-users will jump into the fold. When that happens, it's going to be largely word of mouth that likely fuels this advance, and Amwell will ultimately become what they want to be: one more tool in the toolbox for doctors.
Amwell has been keeping track of things like total visits, but based on word from its CEO, Ido Schoenberg, that's not its primary goal. Its goal, ultimately, is reflected in the number of providers who actively use Amwell's services.
Will the Momentum Remain?
Amwell has benefited substantially from conditions on the ground. The pandemic has driven a particular interest in anything that allows people to not come in contact with each other, while still carrying out as much of normal function as possible. Remote working tools, home office tools, virtual reality, and gaming...all of these have benefited, and Amwell seems to be no different. Again, this is still early days for the entire field; whether or not the momentum we've seen so far will continue to hold is as yet unclear.
A lot's going to have to change in order to make telemedicine part of our everyday lives, starting with hospitals themselves. We're going to need much more universal high-speed internet—no one wants a sluggish connection while trying to determine what that suspicious mole is—and we're also going to need the government's help. Mostly, we're going to need the government to pull some of its earlier help in the form of regulations that might get in the way of data transfer in this way, and we'll need new help in how Medicare and Medicaid billing is treated for remote visits.
We've made the start. That much is clear. But until we go beyond a start, companies like Amwell will remain little more than curiosity vendors supplying healthcare providers in dribs and drabs, not large-scale, ubiquitous operations that everyone uses.
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