Wal-Mart Announces Plan to Become Largest Primary Health Care Provider in U.S.
This morning’s announcement from retail giant Wal-Mart provided an interesting glimpse of what the future of primary care may look like.
Specifically, according to a press release, Wal-Mart plans to begin offering a range of primary health care services such as prevention, diagnostic tests, and even management of chronic conditions such as diabetes and heart disease.
Wal-Mart has issued a 14-page Request for Information (RFI) to health care providers or “vendors” to propose business models whereby Wal-Mart would team up with the vendors to build a “nationally integrated healthcare platform aimed at delivering the lowest cost primary healthcare services.” The RFI seeks vendors to provide services in the following areas:
- Chronic Care (management/monitoring of diabetes, asthma, high blood pressure, obesity, etc.)
- Diagnostic Services (Allergy testing, blood tests, etc.)
- Preventative Services (Vaccines, physical exams, stress management, etc.)
- Health and Wellness (smoking cessation, pregnancy evaluations, etc.)
- Acute Care (Digestive and Urinary exams, skin/hair/nail exams, etc.)
While the provision of basic medical services has slowly moved away from primary care physicians' offices in recent years to places like Rite-Aid or CVS clinics, Wal-Mart’s plan raises some concerns. It is one thing for a patient to receive something like a flu shot or poison ivy cream at a walk-in clinic, but encouraging patients to use store clinics like Wal-Mart may lead to fragmented medical care and weaken the doctor/patient relationship. Additionally, while the clinics are intended to provide primary care services, patients may mistakenly believe that the clinics are a substitute for all health care providers and stop seeing needed specialists such as cardiologists, etc.
In any event, it will be interesting to see how Wal-Mart’s plan involves and if it comes to fruition.
