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 Today in health it, the story is Walmart scaling back its clinic plans. Question mark. 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 today, no sponsor. Just wanted to make you aware of a service we offer.

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It wanted to catch up with competitors like Amazon CVS, who were pushing into healthcare, but new leaders and C Ovid 19 have caused Walmart to slow down the clinic rollout and reassess its model. I'm gonna tell you why I don't really put a lot of stock into this story. And you're going to sort of catch it a little bit here later.

Per visit with or without health insurance, you can do primary care visits, dental exams, vision, uh, counseling, x-rays, and diagnostics. We've talked about this on the show several times. Walmart's vision was to become America's neighborhood health destination. I. This is their push deeper into healthcare, and it came as competitors like Amazon and CVS also bulked up on their healthcare ambitions.

More from the article. Now, Walmart's clinic strategy is in Fluxx. Insider has learned from conversations with eight current and former employees, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the press because of confidentiality agreements. Okay, here's my side note.

First of all, to those eight people, it's really not okay to break your confidentiality agreement just because you can get away with it just saying, I, I, I'm not allowed to talk to you, but I'm, I'm gonna go ahead and do it even though I'm making six figures, or I did previously make six figures from this company and they're currently paying my family's health benefits.

To date, Walmart has opened 20 clinics. The company confirms, so this is their case for they are really slowing it down. They were supposed to have 125 clinics. They're, they only have 20, and that's a fact, right? They, so they, I mean, the . These are hard to dispute. They are moving slower than what their plan originally entailed.

And uh, well, hey, you know what? There was a pandemic, you may not have heard this, but there was a pandemic. It impacted companies like Walmart. Uh, they also talk about the complexity of scaling up a massive healthcare operation. Which has slowed down the clinic rollout. One current employee and two former employees told insider, this is a case where you know you have eight people you're talking to, three said one thing, three said another, three said something else, blah, blah, blah.

I know three and three and three is nine, not eight, but regardless. And they just take snippets from each one and sort of threw it together and got a story. There is less commitment to the strategy. One of them said, I don't doubt that when you have leadership changes. You have this transition while they're trying to figure out, okay, where are we gonna place our betts?

What is the best next move? What you have today is an organization that is playing the waiting game, waiting for the core strategic choices to be made. So this could be some people who really appreciated the previous administration and and don't appreciate the current administration because they have not come down on either side of

Directionally on the strategy. Two current employees said that Walmart was not aiming to for, to get to a set number of clinics built this year. So these are the opposing view. Still several current employees said Walmart continued to back the clinic strategy, adding Walmart is still building clinics and said that healthcare was still a priority.

So you still have. Even more people saying, Hey, this is still a priority, according to everything that we're hearing. In a statement to insider, Walmart said it continued to experiment with the Walmart health centers and that the pandemic had reaffirmed its commitment to healthcare. It pointed to the launch of the pharmacy curbside delivery.

I. C Ovid 19 testing sites and vaccine administration as evidence. Those are all pretty much healthcare type related activities. Walmart did not comment on whether the rollout of the clinics had slowed. Okay, it's slowed, we get it, and then their spokesman comes out and says, Walmart customers want high quality, preventative, affordable, and accessible healthcare, and they trust Walmart to provide it.

We all want those things. What's the, so what? I wouldn't read too much into this. In fact, this is gonna spread like wildfire across healthcare. But at the end of the day, you can see it's, you know, two employees said this, two employees said this. There's, there's some, they're making some jumps based on the number of clinics that are actually out there.

This is gonna fuel our pride in our ego, right? It's gonna make us feel good. See, healthcare is too complex for the likes of Walmart. And we had this, uh, a month ago with Haven, right? Uh, Amazon couldn't figure out Berkshire, JP Morgan couldn't fi figure it out. Uh, you know, they're finally gonna appreciate how hard we work and how hard our efforts are in this space.

I think the thing you have to realize is these are publicly traded organizations. They do not care. I. They compete or partner based on their ability to make money, and healthcare has a ton of money in it, and they have to grow and they're already large. So they have to identify segments where they can grow even larger.

If not now, then sooner or later, each of these companies will make a viable healthcare move. They may partner or they may full on compete. This story is helpful for Walmart. Really, it causes healthcare to let their guard down. Uh, it buys them really more time. This is how these companies move into markets.

We've talked about this before too. They experiment. They experiment, they learn, they experiment, they learn, they experiment, and they, they figure it out until they're ready to scale up, and then they just flatten industries. You know, that's not gonna happen in healthcare because they have no intention of going into the, the high acuity, uh, care space.

But it will impact healthcare because there's an awful lot of, uh, money that comes to healthcare through these types of services, especially imaging and those kind of things. And, uh, and it will. Erode the market dominance that many healthcare organizations have in their markets. You know, I'm also gonna say this, this is an eight.

These are eight employees who spoke on the record over their contractual obligations to not speak. I please about as much stock in this story as I would any. He said, she said Type story you might hear in the grocery store and that pun was intended. 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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