A few years ago, companies like Amazon, Walmart and CVS Health were making ambitious moves into healthcare, promising to reshape how Americans accessed care. But after clinic closures, scaled-back expansion plans and shifting strategies, hospital innovation leaders say the disruption hasn’t disappeared. It has evolved.
In 2024, Walmart closed all 51 of its health centers and shut down its virtual care business, citing reimbursement challenges and rising operating costs. CVS Health, which acquired Oak Street Health for $10.6 billion in 2023, said in October 2025 that it would close 16 of the primary care company’s clinics by the end of February 2026.
Amazon’s healthcare strategy has taken a different path. After shutting down its Amazon Care service in 2022 and acquiring One Medical for $3.9 billion in 2023, the company has continued expanding its network of health system partnerships, including arrangements connecting One Medical patients with specialty care at traditional health systems such as Coral Gables-based Baptist Health South Florida and Cleveland Clinic.
The changes raise a question about the future of healthcare innovation. Have the industry’s would-be disruptors retreated, or have they found a different way to transform care?
Three health system innovation executives told Becker’s that the answer is more complicated than the decline of retail healthcare. They see disruption moving away from attempts to replace traditional care delivery and toward partnerships, artificial intelligence and efforts by health systems to redesign their own operations.
They also cautioned health systems against treating the retreat of outside competitors as a win.
“For health systems, the lesson is not to read someone else’s retrenchment as proof that our model is good enough,” said Richard Zane, MD, chief innovation officer and chief medical officer of Aurora, Colo.-based UCHealth.
For Kiran Avancha, PhD, chief innovation officer at Scottsdale, Ariz.-based HonorHealth, the shift reflects a growing recognition among outside companies that healthcare cannot be transformed through technology alone.
“I think it’s evolved more rather than fizzled out,” he told Becker’s. “I don’t think it’s fizzled or faded, and maybe more matured in my opinion.”
Dr. Avancha said technology companies, retailers and startups have increasingly recognized the complexity of delivering care, particularly across different local markets.
He believes outside companies are placing greater emphasis on building partnerships with health systems rather than developing products independently and attempting to sell them to hospitals.
The lesson extends beyond technology, he said. Clinical workflows, reimbursement models, patient behaviors and regulatory requirements all influence whether an innovation can succeed.
He also questioned the traditional approach of offering hospitals short-term technology pilots with the expectation that they will eventually become paying customers. Sustainable innovation, he argued, requires developing solutions alongside the organizations that will use them.
At Hartford (Conn.) HealthCare, Barry Stein, MD, senior vice president, chief clinical innovation officer and chief medical informatics officer, sees a similar shift, although he believes some of the original excitement surrounding retail healthcare has diminished.
Dr. Stein said large retailers entered healthcare with the belief that consumer recognition, financial resources and scale would be sufficient to transform care delivery.
Those ambitions, he said, encountered an industry dependent on complex operations, regulation and longstanding patient relationships.
But the underlying demand for convenient, consumer-focused healthcare has not disappeared, he said.
Dr. Stein said Hartford HealthCare has intensified its own efforts to improve access and the consumer experience, with a growing emphasis on digital capabilities rather than relying solely on physical locations.
For Dr. Zane, the change is less about who is disrupting healthcare and more about whether organizations can solve meaningful problems sustainably.
“What has faded is the idea that an outside company would replace the traditional healthcare system,” Dr. Zane told Becker’s. “In its place is a more practical focus on improving specific parts of it.”
He said the most promising opportunities involve improving quality, expanding access, reducing the work required to deliver care and creating better experiences for patients and clinicians.
“The ambition is still there, but the conversation is less about who will disrupt healthcare and more about who can solve a meaningful problem sustainably,” he said.
He said the problems that attracted new entrants, including difficult appointment access, confusing navigation and fragmented patient experiences, remain challenges for traditional providers.
The executives also see a new wave of disruption taking shape through AI, digital experiences and changes to how care is delivered.
Dr. Avancha said AI has the potential to improve clinical decision support, operational productivity and patient engagement. But he emphasized that health systems must evaluate technologies against their own challenges rather than adopt new tools simply because they are available.
Dr. Stein sees AI as a major opportunity for health systems, but said technology companies cannot provide the clinical context, patient relationships and safety infrastructure necessary to deliver care on their own.
Hartford HealthCare is working to integrate digital and AI capabilities with its existing care delivery infrastructure, allowing patients to move from technology-enabled interactions to clinicians when needed, he said.
That integration, Dr. Stein argued, is an important distinction between offering a technology product and transforming healthcare.
“Disruption without safety isn’t innovation,” he said.
He also stressed that health systems must independently monitor AI technologies rather than depend entirely on vendors to ensure their safety.
Beyond safety, Dr. Stein said the economics of AI adoption could determine how extensively the technology reshapes healthcare.
“It can’t be runaway token economics,” he said.
For Dr. Zane, the next wave of disruption will require more than introducing new technology into existing processes. He sees the greatest potential in combining AI, consumer-focused care and new business models to fundamentally change how healthcare operates.
“The disruption I care most about isn’t another disconnected offering,” he said. “It’s a fundamentally simpler, integrated more proactive system of care.”
That shift could also change the role health systems play in developing new innovations.
Rather than serving primarily as customers for technology companies, Dr. Zane believes hospitals should help define the problems being solved, design solutions and determine whether those solutions improve care.
“We shouldn’t just be the place where someone else’s innovation gets implemented,” he said. “To me, that’s what being a disruptor means: being willing to fundamentally redesign our own model, using technology deliberately and thoughtfully, rather than simply digitizing what we already do.”
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