When a man in his 40s went to get a toothache checked out recently, the dentist immediately realized his pain wasn’t due to his teeth. The dentist put the patient in a 3D CAT scan that showed a horrific sinus infection, so the dentist called over a primary care doctor. While the pair discussed the patient, the man mentioned his vision was also a little off — could that be due to the sinus infection as well? Probably not, the dentist and doctor agreed and walked the man over to an optician, who prescribed bifocals.
That scenario took place at the first Walmart Health Center, which opened five weeks ago in Dallas, Georgia. And it’s exactly how Walmart is hoping to take care of its customers, Sean Slovenski, Walmart’s president of health and wellness told an audience at the Manova Global Summit on the Future of Health in Minneapolis on Monday.
“We hoped integration would occur,” Slovenski said.
Walmart has been making significant moves in healthcare most recently announcing that it will be providing financial incentives to employees who use high-quality doctors.
But it’s efforts at overhauling healthcare is not meant to be only a boon for employees and shoppers. In the scenario mentioned above, the potential for such collaboration seems to be attractive to providers as well as patients: So far, it hasn’t been hard to recruit medical professionals to rural locations (Dallas is about 45 minutes outside of Atlanta).
“We’ve had hundreds of people applying,” he said. “They’re hungry for something different. Many got into the business to provide care, and the fact that they get to come and practice in a holistic way, it’s like a field day for them.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Since it opened next to Walmart’s Garden Center, the Health Center has averaged over 100 visits a day — about triple the expectation, Slovenski said.
The company realized it was in a unique position to help some of the country’s underserved health care patients, he said, since the equivalent of half of the population of the U.S. walks into a Walmart every week. And those shoppers tend to be rural people who are less likely to participate in regular health care. In fact, the ratio of providers to patients in Walmart areas is one-eighth of the U.S. average, he said.
In keeping with its low-cost mission, the company wanted to attract customers who weren’t using the health care system because of cost: whether because they have health insurance with an unaffordable deductible or catastrophic-only plans, or they don’t have insurance at all.
“The entire company is obsessed with two things: providing the best quality at the lowest price, and taking care of the customer and having a relationship,“ Slovenski said.
The bill for the man with the toothache’s dentist/primary care/optician visit? A third of the traditional cost, Slovenski said. Every patient has the option to pay through insurance or cash on the spot. An appointment that may cost a total of $60-70 through insurance would cost $20 in cash.
In addition to full dental care, primary care and optical care, each health center will have a full laboratory, full imaging services, pharmacies, audiology and behavior health counseling. The next piece, Slovenski said, will be to take advantage of the company’s trucking system — the largest in the country — to offer mobile services. Trucks will travel from store to store to offer specialty services that can be targeted to the needs of individual communities, such as dialysis or mammography.
The second location is under construction and will open in two months, Slovenski said, about 45 minutes away from the first location in Calhoun, Georgia. The company plans to open about 12 more in the next six to nine months.
“We think we’re onto something,” Slovenski said. “But this is just the beginning.”
