Walmart will nearly double the number of new doctor-staffed “Walmart Health” centers it operates next year, announcing plans to add 28 new locations in 2024 alone.
Walmart, which has 32 Walmart Health centers and is opening 17 more in Florida this year, Thursday said it will add 28 new locations in 2024, deepening its presence in Texas while opening new sites in Missouri and Arizona. By the end of 2024, the company will have more than doubled the number of Walmart Health centers it has today to nearly 80 in seven states, the company said.
“These are serious efforts at delivering a broad set of healthcare services,” Walmart’s senior vice president of omnichannel care, Dr. David Carmouche, said in an interview. “These aren’t just urgent cares. They aren’t just for acute episodic care.”
To be sure, Walmart’s new centers build on the first 10,000 square foot facility that opened in 2019 in Dallas, Georgia, where Walmart shoppers and patients in the community have taken to the concept.
In the new Walmart expansion, the centers will each be about “5,750 square feet, located inside Walmart Supercenters, and will feature Walmart Health’s full suite of health services,” the company said. “The range of services include primary care, dental care, behavioral health, labs and X-ray, audiology and Walmart Health Virtual Care telehealth services.”
Walmart last year opened six doctor-staffed Walmart Health centers in Florida and two in Arkansas as the retail giant looks to expand low-cost healthcare services to tens of thousands of its customers. Walmart says it now has 32 Walmart Health centers across Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois and Texas.
Walmart’s latest Walmart Health expansion comes as Amazon enters the business of operating doctor practices with the closing last month of its acquisition of One Medical and retail rivals CVS Health and Walgreens spend billions of dollars adding more healthcare services to existing in-store clinics or attaching new primary care facilities to drugstores.
In the case of Walgreens, the company is opening hundreds of doctor-staffed clinics through its multi-billion-dollar investment in the primary care company VillageMD while CVS has an array of outpatient expansions in the works including its proposed acquisition of Oak Street Health to creating in-store HealthHubs with hundreds of new items to adding new healthcare services to the more than 1,100 CVS MinuteClinics across the U.S. that are staffed by nurse practitioners.
Walmart said the first of the new Walmart Health locations will open in the first quarter of 2024. Over the course of the year there will be: 10 locations in the Dallas area; 8 locations in the Houston area; six locations in the Phoeniz area and four locations in the Kansas City area.
“With these new locations, we will bring to life some of the feedback we’ve heard from listening to our patients,” Walmart’s Carmouche said.
“For example, we are changing the physical footprint and layout of the center so patients spend less time in the waiting room and more time with their doctor,” Carmouche added. “We’ve also integrated modern equipment and technology to enable our providers and patients alike to experience best-in-class healthcare technology. This includes integrating Epic’s electronic health record system across our Walmart Health locations. One important element that will remain the same is our commitment to addressing a patient’s whole health needs, and that’s why our centers will continue to be staffed with qualified doctors, dentists, behavioral health specialists, community health workers and more.”
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