Walmart's 5 key healthcare strategies to take on Amazon and win a bigger slice of the $4.3 trillion industry (2024)

In recent years, has Walmart implemented aggressive moves to try to disrupt the healthcare industry. From using its vast network of US stores to launch clinics across the nation to focusing on virtual care, the company is on the hunt to make a play in a lucrative field. And because Walmart is the world's largest retailer and private employer — it has over 4,700 US stores and about 1.7 million US employees — the retailer can use its scale to make a major splash in the industry.

"Most of America lives within 10 miles of a Walmart, which makes us uniquely positioned to deliver the right care at the right time in the right way," Dr. Cheryl Pegus, the executive vice president of Walmart Health & Wellness, said in October 2021."We are proud to bring our size and scale to make it simple to live healthier."

But Walmart has still faced significant challenges, from major leadership departures to a slower than expected rollout of healthcare clinics. At the same time, rivals like Amazon have made groundbreaking healthcare acquisitions, and other retailers, like CVS Health, have doubled down on their healthcare strategies.

Here are five of the ways Walmart has been looking to make its mark in healthcare.

Rolling out healthcare clinics nationwide

Walmart's board of directors approved the company's biggest healthcare plan yet in 2018, OK'ing a rollout of 4,000 clinics across the country by 2029. These clinics are meant to provide a variety of primary medical services, dental treatments, and behavioral-health services.

That rollout has gone slowly, though, because of the pandemic, leadership changes, and other complications. The company had opened only 32 clinics as of October, across Georgia, Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, and Texas, including eight this year. Marilee McInnis, a Walmart spokesperson, declined to share how many clinics the company planned to open in 2023. The clinics have also struggled with billing patients and health insurers, Insider reported in September 2021.

Todd Huseby, the consumer-healthcare lead at the consulting firm Kearney, told Insider in August that Walmart needed to act with more "urgency" to prove it's serious about reaching its goal.

"They have a very grand mission to provide healthcare to rural Americans who lack access, and Walmart continues to have the best opportunity to offer that," he said. "But I think they've been staying still, and staying still doesn't live up to the ambitions I heard them say two years ago."

Bolstering virtual care for at-home patients

Under Pegus' leadership, the retail giant has turned to online care, which has become more popular amid the pandemic.

Walmart announced in May 2021 that it acquired MeMD, a telehealth provider of physical- and mental-health treatments to millions of US patients.

Arielle Trzcinski, a principal analyst at Forrester, told Insider at the time that Walmart's acquisition of MeMD demonstrated the company's desire to catch up to startups and other established competitors who were more prepared for the digital-health wave.

"Walmart needed to make an acquisition to close the gap between consumers and their retail storefronts," Trzcinski said in May 2021.

Selling its own, cheaper brand of analog insulin

Walmart in June 2021 said it planned to launch the first private-brand analog insulin.

That rapid-acting product, ReliOn NovoLog, would save customers with diabetes as much as 75% an order — that's major considering the skyrocketing costs of insulin made my major manufacturers in recent years.

Walmart estimated in November that roughly 14% of its customers had diabetes. Pegus said in a news release during its analog-insulin launch that the product was part of the company's mission to lower healthcare costs.

"We know many people with diabetes struggle to manage the financial burden of this condition, and we are focused on helping by providing affordable solutions," Pegus said in a press release. "We also know this is a condition that disproportionately impacts underserved populations."

McInnis, the company's spokesperson, declined to say how much Walmart had generated in sales from ReliOn NovoLog vials and FlexPens since launching the ReliOn brand last year. She said that as of July, customers paying with cash had saved more than $15 million on Walmart's insulin compared with the cost of branded insulin products.

Launching a research institute for clinical-trial participation

In August, Walmart filed the trademark "Walmart Healthcare Research Institute," which indicated the company would be participating in some form in clinical-trial research, Insider first reported that month.

On Tuesday, the company officially rolled out the institute, saying that it wanted to help customers participate in healthcare research who might not have had access before.

Sari Kaganoff, the general manager of consulting at Rock Health Advisory, told Insider in August that the majority of patients who participated in clinical trials were typically highly educated, affluent, and white. Walmart's more than 4,700 stores nationwide would help it reach more patients, she said.

Making clinical trials "accessible to a broader array of the population will help get better data and enable people who need that treatment that may not be available in the mainstream yet to do it," Kaganoff said at the time.

Paying for employees to travel to see specialists

Walmart unveiled its Centers of Excellence program for employees in 2013. The program pays for employees to travel to receive treatment from certain specialists.

The concept is meant to keep down healthcare costs for Walmart, a self-insured company that covers medical costs for its employees, and to return employees to the workforce in a speedier manner. Heading into 2022, the company offered six services, including cancer treatment and hip and knee replacements, at 18 health systems across the US.

In September, Walmart launched a Center of Excellence dedicated to fertility and family-planning benefits. Kindbody, which provides fertility care, will be the company's partner in the endeavor and is offering Walmart employees access to more than 30 Kinbody-owned clinics across the country — including a new clinic in Rogers, Arkansas, near the retailer's corporate headquarters.

"It's now becoming a trend where employers are now saying having major medical, vision, and dental isn't enough and we need to add fertility benefits," Dr. Fahimeh Sasan, a founding physician at Kindbody and OB-GYN, told Insider at the time of the announcement.

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Correction: October 17, 2022— An earlier version of this story overstated Walmart's worldwide status as an employer. The company is the world's largest private employer, not the world's largest employer.