We at The Advocate are proud to announce our new partnerships with Optum Health and Amazon. Each will bring added funding for our local information ecosystem, but more than that, new content that we believe our readers will deeply appreciate.
Starting next week, Optum’s Integrity News Team will deliver exciting new features that target readers right where they live, regardless of what may happen with their lifespans. Optum Spokesperson Heather Hannibal said, “These news partnerships are an opportunity for consumers and the local medical community to become more comfortable with a data driven approach to medical deliverables in an efficiency care environment.”
In the coming months, Corvallis will learn firsthand about the benefits of doctors working directly for a patient’s insurer, and why it’s not such a good idea for a doctor to work for anyone else. Consumers will also discover which insurers work best at Optum, a process that can be an exciting journey in which consumers may meet all sorts of new people.
And then there’s our new partnership with Amazon – a company that’s really cooking, or more properly, delivering the cooking. A couple years back, they teamed up with Grubhub, and of late, they’ve become more serious about leveraging into markets like Corvallis.
Amazon spokesman Morley Swallow said, “In the next decade, we will do for restaurants what we did for retail a decade ago – and we see college towns as the natural space to spark a growing wave of innovations, and mouthwatering disruption.”
Swallow excitedly noted, “Right now it’s about food delivery, but what if we could make it about lovingly crafted homecooked meals, beautifully offered directly from Corvallis’ bucolic residential kitchens.”
At present, it’s only the drivers that have an opportunity to work for themselves – but Amazon’s plan would open that possibility to anyone with a kitchen – and this is why Amazon approached us about a news partnership.
Amazon is worried about outmoded health and safety laws and inspections that could stand in the way of a brand of progress that frees people to work from their own kitchens. And, they are also anticipating that some folks could prove overly-sensitized to food deliverers picking up from these liberating kitchens 24/7.
In the coming months, like a good partner, we will make our community aware of the good that Amazon can do for us all.
~ By April Poole, a special correspondent that reports for The Advocate yearly, sometimes, if she gets around to it
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