When you have 220 million customers and members visit approximately 10,500 locations, you have a lot of opportunities before you. I think this is what Walmart is looking at as they’ve begun opening Walmart clinics. Plus, Walmart also has 2.2 million employees which need healthcare as well. In many cases, Walmart is the largest employer in rural towns and needs to provide the best care possible to their employees. In a lot of ways, it makes sense that Walmart would open medical clinics in their stores. It’s convenient for their customers and their employees.
While we won’t dive into the full Walmart healthcare strategy in this article, needless to say they are making a big investment in healthcare. It’s still early, but they’re someone that everyone in healthcare is watching.
This week Walmart announced what amounts to a key indicator that their vision for healthcare is long term. Walmart announced that they’d be using the Epic EHR in their “health and wellness” lines of businesses starting with their “four new Walmart Health Centers opening in Florida in early 2022”.
This announcement to me feels like “No one gets fired for buying IBM.” When choosing an EHR, many have said the same thing about Epic. Although, it’s worth considering if Epic is the right choice for Walmart or not.
On the one hand, I’m sure Walmart loves the idea that the majority of patients are in some Epic system somewhere. That may not be true in their more rural locations where the patients are likely on MEDITECH, but it’s true that the majority of people in the US are in Epic somewhere. The real question is what does this get Walmart? Unfortunately, I think the answer is not very much. You might be able to argue that the patients records will be there, but we all know that it’s up to the health system to enable those features. Many don’t and don’t want to share with essentially their competitors. As Walmart clinics open, they become competitors to the health system. Long story short, getting the patient data is going to be a problem.
I imagine MyChart was also a big piece of what got Walmart interested in Epic as well. I’m confident that Walmart was interested in a great app for patients to be able to access their data, make appointments, etc. One could even imagine a nice Walmart add-on store where patients could buy various supplies or wearables as well. This would be a big win for Walmart if they could essentially create a Walmart store inside MyChart. Nothing like this was announced and I imagine the logistics at a company like Walmart are tough to get through (ie. Walmart Clinics have no real connections to the e-commerce people). However, Epic would be the one you want if you were going to do an ecommerce play like this.
Of course, the real problem is that patients don’t really care about the portal. They don’t remember their passwords. They don’t use them. Ironically, even Judy from Epic has said as much. Plus, the next generation digital front door experience is something that I’d think Walmart will want and Epic doesn’t offer that. Walmart is going to have to get a third party vendor to really create a great experience for their customers.
The biggest head scratcher for me is why Walmart Clinics which are essentially primary care doctors offices would buy the biggest bulkiest hospital EHR out there. Of course Epic can do ambulatory clinics as well. Most of their large health systems use Epic in their ambulatory clinics. However, buying Epic just for your ambulatory clinics feels like someone buying a massive ERP system to send emails. It’s like using a sledge hammer to hammer a nail. Maybe Walmart has bigger plans to open a bunch of rural hospitals too (unlikely) and then this might make sense. Plus, Epic has been trying to create a number of stripped down version of their EHR and maybe that’s what’s in play here. It’s just surprising that a bunch of ambulatory clinics would choose Epic.
My favorite part of the announcement was it said that Walmart selected Epic to “help customers simplify their health care.” Umm…yeah. Count me skeptical, but I’d love to learn how they think they’re going to do that using Epic. [Side Note: I’m also a healthcare vs health care guy too which I think is true for most of us in healthcare.]
Those are some of my initial thoughts about Walmart’s selection of Epic. What do you think? Is this a good fit? Should Walmart have chosen a different EHR? Are there other details of the deal that I’m missing? Let us know in the comments or on social with @hcitttoday.
