Walmart Health Expands Into Florida, Continues to Integrate Behavioral Health

Walmart (NYSE: WMT) will open five Walmart Health locations in Florida, continuing the expansion of the retail titan’s presence in the health care space.

On Tuesday, the company opened a location in Jacksonville, Florida, and announced the opening of at least four more locations in the Jacksonville, Orlando and Tampa areas.

Walmart initially announced a planned expansion into Florida in July 2020 but didn’t identify specific locations at that time.

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These health center locations are located adjacent to Walmart Supercenters and include primary care, labs, X-ray and EKG, behavioral health and counseling, dental, optical, hearing and other services. They are staffed with Onsite Walmart Care Hosts and community health workers as well as clinicians that include physicians, nurse practitioners, dentists, behavioral health providers and optometrists.

“Two years after the launch of Walmart Health, we continue evolving and growing to make health care even more accessible to the communities we serve,” Dr. David Carmouche, senior vice president of omnichannel care offerings at Walmart, said in a news release, adding that the state has a physician presence of 1 per 1,380 residents.

Walmart Health is one of many in the retail and behavioral health spaces that are seeking to “retail-ize” behavioral health, or apply industry tenets such as convenient access and universal brand experiences to an industry that is defined by access challenges and inconvenience.

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In February 2020, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that Walmart Health centers would allow patients to speak with a counselor for $1 a minute. In January 2020, Beacon Health Options expanded its partnership with Walmart to provide select behavioral health services to Walmart

A little over a year later, the company also announced it was buying multi-specialty telehealth provider MeMD to provide, among several other things, a seamless experience for mental health services.

Walmart operates 387 retail locations and employs about 121,000 people in Florida.

The Florida sites will also be the first to deploy the electronic health record suite provided by Verona, Wisconsin-based Epic Systems Corp., one of the largest providers in that space.

Walmart Health will use Epic’s platform to enhance communication, personalization and information sharing amongst health care professionals and patients utilizing a patient portal, the release states.

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