(Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc. is done dabbling in health care.

With its proposed $3.49 billion purchase of One Medical parent 1Life Healthcare Inc., the e-commerce giant is taking its biggest step yet into an industry that accounts for about one-fifth of the US economy. 

The deal announced Thursday will give Amazon relationships with hundreds of thousands of patients and their employers as well as brick-and-mortar clinics in major cities across the US. Combined with Amazon’s existing online pharmacy and nascent telehealth and housecall services, the deal shows that the Seattle-based company is serious about building a comprehensive health care business.

“One Medical is sort of the Whole Foods of primary care,” said Dan O’Neill, a former health care consultant who is now the commercial officer at senior-focused care company Pine Park Health. “It’s expensive but it’s a good customer experience, and it’s popular.”

O’Neill said One Medical’s clinics could eventually augment Amazon’s virtual offerings by stitching together online consultations with in-person tests and treatments when needed. Such integration would bring convenience to patients, much the way Amazon customers can return packages at Whole Foods stores.

“This puts Amazon much further up the list” of entities trying to assemble vertically integrated health care businesses at a multi-billion-dollar scale, said Lisa Bielamowicz, president of consultancy Gist Healthcare. “If I’m Optum or I’m CVS-Aetna, I’m looking at this and saying, ‘these guys are serious and they’re starting to put their own pieces together in a way that will create a unified product.”

Still, health industry experts say the purchase falls short of a transformative deal that will turn Amazon into a major contender overnight. As with the company’s 2017 acquisition of Whole Foods Market, Amazon is buying a niche player in a massive market. And while the Whole Foods deal didn’t make Amazon a dominant grocer, it did sufficiently spook Amazon’s retail rivals for them to redouble efforts to build out food delivery services. It also helped turn concerns about Amazon’s market power into antitrust investigations in the US and Europe. 

The One Medical acquisition is unlikely to be blocked by regulators. But antitrust scrutiny could dampen future health care merger prospects for Big Tech companies, SVB Securities analysts wrote in a research note. And the deal was already prompting concerns about how much Amazon knows about its customers. The company became the world’s largest online retailer in part thanks to meticulous collection and analysis of shopping data. With One Medical, it’s set to become the custodian of medical records for hundreds of thousands of people. 

Read more about Wall Street’s push into heath care

Regulators and lawmakers have accused Amazon of using the shopping data it collects from third-party merchants to copy their products. The company has said that it has policies against using individual seller data to compete with them.

Amazon, which declined to make executives available to discuss the deal, said the transaction won’t change One Medical’s obligations under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act to protect patients’ privacy. 

One Medical, which has never turned a profit, has more than 8,500 business clients and about 767,000 patients, it said in a securities filing. That’s a substantial base, but hardly an Amazon-scale platform.

For years, Amazon had cast a shadow over health care, a massive industry that’s long been a target of tech giants and venture capitalists. The company acquired mail-order pharmacy PillPack Inc. and folded the operation into its retail website, then started Amazon Care, a primary-care and telehealth venture offered at first to employees. Amazon today offers that service to other companies. The company last year wound down a joint venture with Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. that had tried to cut employees’ health care costs. 

The One Medical acquisition is the first deal since Neil Lindsay, a veteran Amazon executive, was given oversight of the various units working on health care. Lindsay, who previously led Amazon’s Prime membership business and global marketing teams, said in statement that Amazon sees “lots of opportunity to both improve the quality of the experience and give people back valuable time in their days.” 

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.