Walmart retail clinics-new opportunity for hospitals
Posted on September 20, 2010 by Jeffrey Newman
Local hospitals and hospital systems are expanding by agreeing to run clinics at Walmarts in their communities. Walmart is planning to put in over 2000 health clinics. So far, nearly half the retail clinics are located in the most populous states, California, Florida, Illinois, Minnesota and Texas. Clinical services include: Treatment for acne, bladder infections, blood sugar testing, cholesterol screeniing, sinus infections, flu and more.What Could such clinics mean for the future of healthcare? One potential benefit could be closer monitoring of chronic disease at much less cost throught he use of videconferencing technology which some think we will be an additional tool that will be engaged at such clinics to allow physicians to speak with patients more regularly, monitor compliance with drug theraoy and assure consistency of vital signs and even bloodwork status without the necessity of patients entering a hospital. So the ultimate care received may increase in terms of patient health outcomes. Another potential benefit may be through data mining information from patients, subject to careful privacy controls, in order to decipher patterns and correlations in what therapies and are working and whether there maybe other correlations, for example in the blood work of individuals with a particular chrnoic disorder which may lead to the development of new therapies. One thing that Walmart is good at is taking goods or services and offering them for less price given its buying power. This kinds of data mining, using machine learning and predictive modeling has been used recently by researchers in Parkinson’s disease and also in the development for a more effective drug cocktail for AIDS patients. It has been the subject of various blogs in this site and there is no reason to believe that Walmart will not seek to exploit the growing arena of data mining simply because it has not done so yet. To think that one day a major disease may find a cure with the help of Walmart’s savvy business model is pretty cool.