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Paging Dr...Walmart?
Get your grocery shopping and physicals done...all in the same place.
Ahmed Saeed
February 14, 2024
Sponsored by
Welcome to Wednesday bites, where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter our doom scrolling inspires all our weekly posts.
We’re talking about Walmart’s deeper foray into healthcare, specifically, doctor-led healthcare centers
These next 2 issues are special. These are our first subscriber-led issues. We got so much information from our people that we had to split up the information. Part 2 is coming on Sunday.
Big shouts to:
Healthcare Chief of Staff guy
Healthcare Strategy/AI Startup Guy
Pharma/Biotech Bro
Healthcare Consulting Director/Harvard Guy
Healthcare Finance Guy
Let’s get into it
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TL;DR INDEX CARD
1. Walmart is slated to open 70+ healthcare centers across the country by end of this year
2. The move comes on the heels of other companies getting into healthcare during/after the pandemic, which exposed a lot of opportunities to unlock massive value
3. This is all part of the cloud that is Value Based Care (VBC) which emphasizes patient outcomes + experience over the traditional models of incentivizing procedures
BUT FIRST….A little context:
It’s important to understand 2 big things in healthcare right now.
Value Based Care: Care focused on patient outcomes.
Fee for Service: Care that incentivizes for high patient volume and conducting procedures.
VBC is on a huge trend up, mostly since the passage of the Affordable Care Act. The delivery of better patient experience and outcomes has been a huge signal for technology companies to try their hand at fixing a compartmentalized system.
That’s why we’ve seen such a huge proliferation of remote monitoring and telemedicine (accelerated by the pandemic).
Why Walmart is opening health centers
Let’s ask Healthcare Strategy/AI Startup guy:
Put simply, Walmart sees a huge value unlock across the space that play to its strengths: Cost, accessibility, and using data to drive sales in health-related categories (food, drugs, etc.).
Seems like a logical move for a low-cost retailer to expand health services in the country that is near the top for healthcare spending.
What’s Walmart’s strategy to win?
Here’s a deep(ish) dive into the 3 above-mentioned aspects:
Cost: Walmart commands pricing power across all of its vendors. It’s called ‘predatory pricing’ but the phenomenon went to the backburner when Amazon’s algorithm upended local businesses overnight.
Accessibility: 90% of the US population lives within 10 miles of a Walmart. This could be viewed as part of the solution to delivering healthcare in rural areas.
Data-Driven Opportunities: Oh you have low iron? We sell dates and other high-iron foods 50 feet away. Events like these would allow Walmart to drive sales to patients across a number of categories.
Could this plan go haywire?
Yes. absolutely. And we enlisted the help of Healthcare Consulting Director/Harvard Guy to tell us why:
1. Patient compliance and adherence to more complex behavioral metrics [will] require a heavy investment.
2. Ensuring revenue from [Healthcare centers] would consistently require additional oversight and staffing.
3. Care practices and services across different sites would have to align. That’s not easy.
What AI Made This Week
Sick Fits by Ahmed
Antwan Sargent. There’s no explanation needed.
Well, a little explanation.
..And he tiptoes a teetering tightrope between smart and casual, oversized and slim fit, but does so with aplomb. What’s his cheat code? At a guess, he just knows what works for him and doesn’t overthink things.
Have a great week!
Ahmed and Peter
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