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  Today in health it, the story is Dollar General hires a Chief Medical Officer. Where are they going? My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in health it. A channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. VMware has been committed to our mission of providing relevant content to health IT professionals since the start.

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Uh, Walmart and a couple of other shows as well. Kroger's partnered with Ohio Health and a hundred pharmacies inside of grocery stores throughout central Ohio and so forth. This one, I think is more interesting to me because it really addresses rural healthcare, so I. Here's the story. Dollar General hires Chief Medical Officer, boost healthcare items.

This is where you start, right? You start by changing what's in the aisles, putting in some refrigerators, and putting in healthier food and those kind of things. That's exactly where they're starting. So let me give you some of the excerpts from the story. Dollar General said Wednesday. That it has hired its first Chief medical officer and will add products such as cold and cough medication and dental supplies to Shell as it aims to become a healthcare destination.

CEO Todd Vasos said the company's new push is inspired by customers who said they want more convenient and affordable healthcare products and services. Our goal is to build and enhance affordable healthcare offerings for our customers. You get the picture. The fast growing discounter has more than

17,400 stores across the country, including many rural areas that don't have many other groceries or pharmacies nearby. Think about that. 17,400 stores, and I've driven from where I live in southwest Florida. I. To Orlando and I took a back road up to that location and you'll see those Dollar General stores, they're there.

They're pretty well frequented. The parking lots are full. So this is the start of an interesting strategy for rural healthcare. I. So where do they go from here? It has piloted new ways to provide medical care to last month. It offered free COVID-19 testing at select locations through a partnership with the Virginia Department of Health.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, I. It was in talks with the company about turning stores into Covid vaccine sites through the CD. C and Dollar General have yet to announce any official plans. So it's interesting because that's the population we're struggling to reach, and that is a population that they are.

Really well positioned to serve Dollar General's new and remodeled locations will also make room for more aisles of health products and coolers of food. The company said in Spring that it's building bigger stores as it opens more than a thousand new locations. This year, on Wednesday, the retailer. Said it hired Dr.

Albert Wu as its Chief Medical Officer. He previously worked at McKinsey and Company where he led a team that was focused on healthcare related projects, such as providing care to thousands of rural patients, modeling how to support pandemic relief efforts, and designing a digitally driven health insurance in a research note, Jeffries Analyst.

Corey Tarlow said The expansion into healthcare will help the retailer gain market share, and boost profitability as customers visit stores more regularly and toss additional items into shopping carts. Drug stores in particular, have been a place where Dollar General is stealing market share. He said Dollar General's prices tend to be 40% cheaper than drug stores, 20% cheaper than grocery stores.

And in line with mass market retailers. According to the firm's research with the effort, he said Dollar General is further solidifying the company's moat as a leader among value and discount retailers. I think this story's really interesting. So here's my so what on this, and this is off the top of my head, but really three things that jump out at me as I think about this one is.

An approach to rural healthcare. The second is retail partnerships, if I was thinking about it from my health system's perspective. And the third is social determinants. So the first thing, rural healthcare, I think this is the most important aspect of this play in that Dollar General, is in those locations where you're not gonna find a lot of CVSs and Walgreens and other

Types of pharmacies, you're gonna find the competition there is gonna be the grocery store with a pharmacy attached to it, or maybe even some of the small local pharmacies might be their competition. But the reality is people will go to the Dollar General, just like you and I in in Urban Center, might go to Costco or those kind of things.

And so by. Putting better items in those stores by putting access to good food, by putting access to vaccines, flu shots, and those kind of things. It's just going to be a better all around solution for rural healthcare. That's one aspect. The second is you can't underestimate the number of locations they have.

And the targeted locations that they are in. So this is an interesting potential for a partnership to reach rural healthcare locations. And I, I wouldn't be surprised to see Dr. Wu from McKinsey looking at strategic partnerships moving forward to actually get more physicians in their locations and providing some basic services.

That's number one, retail partnerships. Being the second, and I rattled off some of them early on here, and I, I think that is going to be one area that we need to be really good as health systems is what retail partners are we going to partner with? How are we going to expand? I. Beyond our footprint. It's always about how do we get outside the four walls of our health system And retail partnerships is one of those ways that you can do that.

Now you can choose to try to partner with CVS, Walgreens and the usual suspects, but some of those partnerships might start to dry up in the coming years. As they come more and more into healthcare themselves, maybe even hiring some physicians themselves. I'm not sure where that's gonna go, but I would keep that in mind and, but I would always be looking for more retail partnerships, and I think the grocery stores and discount stores are a great option.

The third thing is social determinants. We know that only 20% of healthcare outcomes are related to the actual delivery of healthcare, which means 80% is outside of that. So. When you look at rural locations, getting aisles with the refrigerators, with fresh produce, hopefully sourced locally from some of the growers that are local.

Getting just better quality items into these stores I think is going to help in terms of the market that these. Locations serve and we've gotta be thinking more and more about healthy communities and social determinants. And yes, this doesn't address education and it doesn't address employment and some other things, but it does start to get beyond the 20% that we can control, which is healthcare related and, but does get into food and quality food and really diet and those kinds of things.

And you know, you can see a nutritionist maybe factoring into some sort of offering. That you see from Dollar General moving forward, and that would actually go a long way in building healthier communities in our rural locations. Alright, that's all for today. If you know of someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note.

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