Welcome to Walmart. The nurse will be right with you.
Walmart, the nation?s largest retailer, has spent years trying to turn some of its millions of customers into patients, offering a simple menu of medical services that consumers can buy along with everything from a bag of chips to a lawn mower. Now, the store is making an aggressive push to become a one-stop shopping destination for medical care.
The company has opened five primary care locations in South Carolina and Texas, and plans to open a sixth clinic in Palestine, Tex., on Friday and another six by the end of the year. The clinics, it says, can offer a broader range of services, like chronic disease management, than the 100 or so acute care clinics leased by hospital operators at Walmarts across the country. Unlike CVS or Walgreens, which also offer some similar services, or Costco, which offers eye care, Walmart is marketing itself as a primary medical provider.
Like its competitors, Walmart is looking to grab a bigger share of the billions of health care dollars being spent in the United States and benefit from the changes that have resulted from the Affordable
Care Act.
With its vast rural footprint, Walmart is positioning its primary care clinics in areas where doctors are scarce, and where medical care, with or without insurance, can be prohibitively expensive. If they succeed, the company said, it is prepared to open even more.
?If they?re rolling it out across the rural stores primarily, they?re actually filling an important gap in the health care ecosystem,? said Skip Snow, a health care analyst at Forrester Research.
But while experts agree that increased access to health care is a good thing, others say patients with chronic conditions need complex care that retail giants cannot provide. Diseases like diabetes, for example, can result in complications that are not easy to manage.
?There?s not a role for retail clinics to take care of chronic, ongoing problems like that,? said Dr Robert L Wergin, the president-elect of the American Academy of Family Physicians. ?It can provide a service, maybe an entryway into a system.?
While the company says that about 15 to 20 patients use the existing primary clinics every day, a large percentage of those patients do not have a primary doctor outside Walmart, according to Dr David Severance, the corporate medical director at QuadMed, which is joining with Walmart to help staff and run the clinics.
For patients with complex issues, Dr. Severance said, the goal was for Walmart to be a patient?s first stop and part of a continuum of care. ?In that circumstance, it?s our desire to get those individuals established with a primary care provider, preferably a physician within the community,? he said.
Last year, Walgreens announced it would begin offering some primary care services like disease monitoring at its 400 clinics across the country. But it does not market the facilities as primary care clinics, a spokesman, John Cohn, said, adding that the company ?strongly? encourages patients to seek continuing care elsewhere.