Amazon is best known for its e-commerce business, but in recent years, it has also made a big push into healthcare. The company's Amazon Pharmacy (AMZN) delivers prescriptions to customers' doors. It also offers automatic coupons so that customers don't have to hunt around for cost savings, with Amazon saying customers have saved more than $9 million through the program so far. As part of Yahoo Finance's Healthcare Week, Amazon Pharmacy Chief Medical Officer Dr. Vin Gupta tells Anjalee Khemlani that the service helps "address the biggest problem in healthcare, which is patient information, patient awareness of services, of products that can actually result in lower costs to them for their prescription medications."

Yahoo Finance will be providing more analysis on the healthcare industry in its week-long special Healthcare: Industry Checkup.

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Video Transcript

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: But let's focus on the pharmacy for a second. You've got the $5 RX pass. You've got discounts. You've got automatic coupons, which, as we understand, has saved customers $9 million over the course of-- since the launch. So how does this all play into what the future is for this segment?

VIN GUPTA: Well, Anjalee, I say this as a pulmonologist right outside an ICU here today. I have a foot in both worlds, traditional healthcare and what we're building at Amazon, specifically at Amazon Pharmacy. As you pointed out, all these feature sets are really set to address the biggest problem in healthcare, which is patient information, patient awareness of services, of products that can actually result in lower costs to them for their prescription medications.

We have a Prime Prescription Savings Program that, Anjalee, was shown by an external group of pharmacists from the University of Toledo to actually save more money than when patients use, say, their co-pay for 20 of the most common generic medications across the country. That price transparency gets talked about a lot. It's price transparency in medicine doesn't really exist at scale. We're trying to solve for that at pharmacy through the coupons program, which you just talked about.

If there's a coupon to make branded medications like insulin products cheaper, we're going to figure out a way to automate that so patients don't have to think about it. That's exactly what's underpinning the coupons program that has saved over $9 million for patients across the country that utilize our services.

It's basically just automating a manufactured coupon for a branded medication that we support through this program versus having somebody having to download a bunch of paperwork and go through a very complicated morass of hurdles to get those savings. 85% of the time, the American patient across the country doesn't actually realize those savings, Anjalee. We're trying to make that easier.