Ep. 130: Leading Through Turbulent Times in Your Clinic
About this Episode
On April 30th, Walmart announced that after five years, it would be closing its 51 Walmart Health Centers. The closure is due to rising costs and reimbursement issues. Walmart Health, which offered urgent care and dental services, aimed to open in every Walmart store. The closure presents opportunities for urgent care clinics to acquire cheap leases, equipment, and recruit new team members. Nick and Michael discuss the lessons to take from Walmart Health, including the need for creativity in expanding services and adapting to changing reimbursement rates. Demand for urgent care remains strong, and clinics can thrive by offering occupational medicine, weight loss, and other services.
Topics Covered
- The impact of rising costs and reimbursement issues leading to the closure of Walmart Health facilities.
- The opportunities for urgent care clinics to acquire affordable leases, equipment, and new team members from the closed Walmart Health facilities.
- The importance of creativity in expanding services and adapting to changing reimbursement rates, as learned from Walmart Health.
- The strategies for urgent care clinics to thrive by offering services such as occupational medicine, weight loss programs, and more, due to the sustained demand for urgent care.
"It's a real trend that we're seeing right now where these big, massive companies, be it hospitals or whatever, that jumped into the urgent care space are now jumping out of the urgent care space."
Michael Ray, Patient Care Marketing Pros
Patient Care Marketing Pros (00:03)
April 30th Walmart Health announced plans to close operations at all its facilities this year. At this time, we are not accepting new patients. If you are a new Walmart Health patient on Centene Value, Centene Core, or a Medicare Advantage plan provided by United, Humana, or WellCare, please stay on the line. All righty.
Welcome to an awkward edition of Walk -Ins Welcome. That was a fun little recording that Michael just played for us. It's not even, so, all right, let's just be honest. Something big has changed in urgent care. For you urgent care, you're like, eh, whatever, it's just Walmart. But it means something more than just simply closing a bunch of urgent care clinics. For sure. Yeah. Walmart doesn't just haphazardly do things. Walmart doesn't have...
funding issues. Walmart doesn't have cash issues. I looked it up today. There were $648 billion. And they have like 2 .1 million employees. Yeah, like they're one of the largest employers in the country. Might as well for many they just like, yeah. Yes, that's real. But for those who don't know, April, as I just played April 30th, Walmart Health is closing, like closing immediately.
So it's April 30th. We're here in the first week of May. And I think based on the recording, they got 30 days. And so that's a real thing. They had 51 locations. 51 locations are closing across five states. Yeah. And most of those like Texas, Oklahoma, the middle of the country. Surely Arkansas, where they're from. I'm sure. Yeah, for sure. But here's the thing. It was funny. Just a few months ago, I was like, Hey, Ergyn, do you think this Walmart thing coming up is a big comedy? Like,
we don't really know because most of them weren't in the same state. But now it's like, man, it's just not going to happen. But it's a trend. It's a real trend that we're seeing right now where these big, massive companies, be it hospitals or whatever, that jumped into the urgent care space are now jumping out of the urgent care space. Right. And that's a big deal. And I think we need to talk about that today. Well, as always, on Walk -Ins Welcome, we're here to help you get more patients deliver better care.
get repeat visitors and scale your clinic. Part of that is just having a real discussion about, you know, the state of the healthcare industry, the state of urgent cares. And it's just like you'd mentioned, man. We're seeing them closing 51 locations with their whole goal was to open in every Walmart that still had brick and mortar. Yeah, yeah. And it would be like an attachment to it. Like, I've seen all the imagery of the actual facilities. They're beautiful. Yeah, Walmart Health look good. They were trying to do it right.
Yeah, they were I think there's a stigma that goes with Walmart. So like, because who here banks at the Walmart woods, forests, whatever bank? Well, I mean, they have vision. They're still committed to vision. They are they have I think they have like dental and some of them, which is odd. So learning through this, because I've been digging around today just to see so.
The Walmart health was an urgent care slash dentist office. Okay. So that was part of it. That was part of the mix because I reached out to some, to the dental recruiting guy, like the main guy, and he has the open for work on his LinkedIn. Now, first of all, if, if you're in the urgent care space and you work for Walmart and you have now opened a networking and looking for employment, I just want you to know that like, I'm sorry that that's happening to you. Absolutely. It sucks, especially, you know, when we love and care so much about this industry.
to see Walmart do what Walmart does, which is suck in an industry and break it. That's what they do. They go into small towns and they shut down local businesses and, and, and then they open up new sectors and they cause damage in that sector. Sometimes they do really well in the sector. I mean, that's not, that's not, they are serving a purpose. There's a reason they're a $650 billion company. Yeah. I mean, like it is safe to say.
Walmart grocery is a part of our lives. Right. Like it is now like a permanent option to how we buy groceries around here, at least for this area. Yeah. And like the alternatives aren't that like, are okay. Like you have a public to all do whatever. Right. So you don't have real quick, man, like Walmart marketplace is good grocery store. Walmart super center, hot, wet garbage. Well, and the marketplaces are going away. Basically. I know.
So like they said, they go in, they make an impact, they do something and then they break it. Yeah. But anyway, so like, but it's so fascinating because I was looking at looking it up. So Walmart health came out around 2019. Right. So right before COVID, I can't help but wonder if they had an inside look at what was coming. Well, well, you know, the reality of it is, you know, Walmart at, so I remember learning some of this, like the Walmart in China, right? So.
So it's real fascinating when people go shopping and like it may have changed, but when a couple of years ago, when they go shopping, they go to the grocery store four times a day because they get just enough to take home because they're not in the car. Right. They travel and buy whatever. Anyway, so I'm sure Walmart saw some stuff happening with COVID -19 kicking in and they're like, here's an opportunity. And they went after it. They went after it hard. And the part that blows my mind. So I've been digging around looking at all these people on LinkedIn.
They were posting like two weeks ago, hey, we're about to open 22 new locations in Texas for Walmart health. Like in April, they were posting that. And then they, boom, cut it off. Cut it off hard. Yeah, for real. So anyway, want to bring it to the table. So the question becomes, why? Why did they cut this off? Why? Because from our standpoint, urgent cares can be very profitable. It takes a lot of effort.
But for some reason, honestly, you would think they have a built in audience, like a really good audience, like where they go to the they feel sick, they go there and they walk over to the pharmacy at Walmart. And then, you know, it's a captive audience, in my opinion, like it makes sense. But it didn't seem to work because so we dug around, looked at the Walmart corporate release on this and one is a why did we do this? Of course, it was the most corporate response ever. But basically too freaking expensive, weren't making enough money.
how to cut it off. Well, so let's, that's the, what's the word I'm looking for? Slang version. Yeah. Right. The non -corporate version. The non -corporate version. The very, the very in -house version of that. Cut it off. I think two things that you have to look at here on, based on what they said is one, they said rising costs. Yes. They're absolutely talking about inflation.
Yeah. You know, like you can't, I don't, I'm not interested in your politics. Okay. I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to our audience. I'm not interested in that. You vote however you feel like you need to vote. All right. But you cannot, unless you live under a rock, not notice that prices are out of control right now, or at least they are in the Southeast. I can tell you that. Right. Yeah. So and retailers are starting to adjust, but overall, like because it's been out of whack for so long, wages are now just, they're not going backwards. Yes.
Correct. So wages are continuing wages are trying to catch up with inflation. So there's a cost there. Everybody is increasing their prices in response to that tax burdens. Taxes are changing again. I'm not going to get into details there, but they see the writing on the wall as far as like these costs have no hope of coming down anytime soon. Right. Then we have a health care system that
hasn't changed in 15 years. And what I mean by that is I'm talking about how reimbursement works. I'm not talking about like the Affordable Health Care Act. Yeah, they specifically said in their statement due to the reimbursement environment, which basically means they weren't getting paid like they were used to getting paid. And then honestly, as you guys all know, like dealing with insurances and getting things approved that just shouldn't be approved doesn't always happen.
And I also noticed as a society thing, like they were a premier virtual care for United people. Yeah, United healthcare, United healthcare, which I think there's a stigma with United, but I'm positive with that after coming back from the urgent care. Dr. Glockoma Flecken made that real clear. Everybody applauded him. Yeah, they did. It was fun to learn. But anyway, so like, I think at the end of the day, they assume because we call it retail medicine, right? Retail healthcare. So retail healthcare. And so
They're like the ultimate retailer in the world. I've been in big corporate where like, shoot, we can do that. You know, like this will be easy because we've done it before. We have all the technology. I bet in their minds, all we gotta do is just figure out this insurance stuff and it'll be fine. And they ran with it for almost five years. Hey, we can pat ourselves on the back. We lasted longer than Walmart Health. There you go. We'll do a high five on that one. There you go. Actually, I'm kind of...
I don't have a multi billion dollar corporation to fall back on if this fails. But now you know, but we made money. All that being said, so so what's happening now? So one, I would say, for those who had Walmart helps in your area, when they're going away, so hey, that's some pretty cheap, least stuff coming up for potential buildings, equipment, equipment is going to be coming from and lots and lots of recruitment opportunities.
So you know how hard it is to find a front desk person. You know how hard it can be to find a nurse or a nurse practitioner or whatever. Man, it is the field is ripe for harvest for getting some new team members. Yeah, absolutely. And like really good team members too, right? Because like Walmart doesn't halfway do stuff. And so you know, there's some good practices mixed into that. Who knows what some of the things they were taught, but.
At the end of the day, like this is your opportunity of looking like you're going to have a flood. If you got a flood of emails recently or requests on LinkedIn, this might be why. Because I went on to LinkedIn today just to look. So if you go to Walmart, if you go to LinkedIn, go to Walmart Health, you can see people, right? Click on people for that profile. And there's 534 members on LinkedIn specific to that, right? Which there's 51 locations. I mean, that actually kind of lines up to a degree.
well over half had the little hashtag that said open to work. And they for real were open to work. Now I'm not going to mention any names, but you had reached out to somebody who immediately said, yeah, let's chat. I need help finding a job. Yeah. And then she found her Facebook, like found all these different things about like dug into us really, really fast, which was cool. But no, it's real. And like I was reading on some of these people, like they were all like posting, like everything was normal. I mean, this was blindsided.
You can tell in the way that young lady had responded to you that she was still picking her jaw off the ground. She was still in shock. I could tell by the way she was just responding to you. Yeah, because it's been just a little over a week since they announced it, which means, honestly, the way it was announced and the reaction, I don't think anybody knew beyond leadership. No, nobody had a clue. Yeah. So that would have leaked at Walmart.
man, they couldn't tell anybody to be honest with you. Cause that would have leaked. It would have been bad PR. They have to control that narrative. I'm not going to fault Walmart on keeping that hush. I hope they did the right thing on severance packages or, or, you know, taking care of these people as they had to let them go. I hope they did, but it's Walmart. Yeah. Well, I'm gonna keep my assumptions to myself on that. Cause I don't know what they would do, but I'd say let's give our audience a pound in the back though, because y 'all are doing something that Walmart couldn't do.
At the end of the day, Walmart gave a very good try for five, almost five years. They call it the old college try. The old college try. They made it four years, right? And they fell in their face. So like that was the college try I gave. Yeah. And I, and so I like to, I've read, if any of y 'all know or listening that we're part of Walmart health, I love to talk to you because I want to know like what kind of numbers were y 'all pulling that was not viewed as profitable. Cause like where's 40 patients a day that the number you can never hit or was there something else going on?
Loved the insides of that because for our sake, you know, we're from Alabama. They weren't here in Alabama. So we never got to see it in person. Isn't that weird though? Like they're all around us. I mean, you're Arkansas, Mississippi. They skip over to Florida. They're in Tennessee. They're over in Texas. They skip Alabama completely. I bet they skipped it because of AFC. Yeah. AFCs are ballers. Well, and it's, you know, it's headquartered here, right? And then we noticed that one of the main credentialing.
managers was an AFC person for years and switch over to Walmart out. So I bet there was a lot of AFC conversations that went on. Sure. There's a little regret in that too. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so all that being said, like now that we have this opportunity that the Walmart competitors gone, you still got your local competitors that you have to deal with all the time for sure. But what lessons can we start to learn from Walmart? Like what are the things like? Obviously more will come out later at some baby.
Maybe not. They may just make it disappear like Amazon does. Whole Foods disappearing halfway through. But what are the things that we're learning there? At the end of the day, you can have all the right backing in the world, but if it doesn't make sense over time, then you got to make a change. And they were expanding crazy. They were. And they were doing that, by the way, off of market data. I mean, it is very clear that the two reasons why they shut these locations down and stop the expansion.
was due to, even though they didn't call it inflation, they said rising prices, which is called inflation. And the coding side of that were the medical reimbursement. It was very clear that it wasn't because of demand. It wasn't because of opportunity. Those things were probably not factored into that at all. Right. It was simply those two things, rising prices, reimbursement rates. So I mentioned that, Michael, to say like,
From what we're seeing, we work with a lot of urgent cares. Demand is good. It's there. It's there. Even going into the summer months, like we're seeing really good conversions. We're seeing really good opportunities. We're starting to really be able to make an impact on some of the people that are newer to us. I'm not going to mention names there, but you know, it's nice to see that. Especially when they've been struggling so hard to just, you know, make headway in their markets. And then I'm like, yes, if you do these things,
you're going to get there. You're going to get the new patients. It's going to happen. But this is where you're starting to see some creativity coming in on the urgent cares as well as like if we don't have control over the raising prices and we don't have control over the reimbursement rates, that's where you start getting occupational medicine. That's where you start seeing weight loss. That's where you start seeing injectables. That's where you start seeing the creativity. And what I love about
the retail side of the healthcare is creative ways to expand your practice. Yeah. You know, I wonder too, because, you know, they had the dental side and it's a very interesting concept where you walk into a single location and one side to dental, one side just, you know, internal medicine essentially. And I wonder like, what was the decision making around that? Maybe they were just trying to check every box they could that was retail related. I'm surprised it didn't slip in like chiropractor or something that kind of.
rounded out a little bit. yeah. Seriously. Like next thing you know, they have acupuncture going on in the back of Walmart. Ooh, I don't know about that. I'm just kidding. Am I kidding? I mean, I just, I associate acupuncture and chiropractic together. I don't really know why I'm probably way off base there. That's really interesting. Well, we saw that in Las Vegas airport. I mean, I've seen two or three chiropractors that I've even been to that offer acupuncture. So.
I just put those two together. I don't really know why urgent cares. They also use essential oils like every kind of practice I've ever been in has essential oils I'm serious. I don't know what it is. That's kind of funny holistic. I guess yeah. Yeah, that's true But at the end of the day like, you know talking about the different options there, you know There was no I couldn't find unless I just didn't see it I couldn't find anything that talked about Walmart health offering like Occupational medicine and all these other things that we've talked about that help boost your business
But I think at the end of the day, like, I don't know, it looks like they were just aiming for location, location, locations, and the demand will just catch up. And I think they just poorly, there was a poor execution or the expectations were just way off. I mean, you got to really think of it this way too. They're bringing sick people inside of a grocery store. Well, sort of. I'm just saying something about that just doesn't work. Well, I mean, the pictures that I saw on the internet, even though I know it didn't represent all of them.
were like the places were inside like of an aisle. wow. At Walmart. Those are the pictures that I saw. And I saw some that were like they look like independents that were stuck to the side. I missed those. Yeah. They may have had their own entrance. And they may not. And that may have been part of the problem. They didn't know what was working and what wasn't. Get your COVID shot and shop for your clothes. You know, I wonder now, are, do we have any urgent cares that are in a Walmart center? Like they're not inside the Walmart, but like inside the shopping center. Not to my knowledge. No, they all have a hood at sports.
Yeah, that's all. So I learned that from you, which that sold for like a billion dollars. Yeah, they just sold last month for like a billion dollars. By Academy now or something? No, some company out of Europe. Okay. Anyway, but so that was the concept. Hibbett. So those who don't know Hibbett Sports is a local to us Birmingham, but they have maybe thousands of locations. And so sporting store and there I remember going in and sitting down for like an American Marketing Association lunch.
And the main lady that ran over like the acquisition and the growth of the company spoke and she said, our entire model is wherever Walmart goes, we go because Walmart sporting goods section was limited and we would win because they would go there, not find what they need and drive across the parking lot and come to us. I mean, it absolutely works. I can't tell you how many pair of cleats I've bought that I couldn't find at Walmart. Yeah. Baseball bat or a glove or you name it.
Yeah, because what happened has nothing to do with Walmart closing stores. No, but at the end of the day, like at the end of the day, like Walmart is no joke, right? Like they don't go in this halfway and they affect industries. They do. And then sometimes if you can just run off their tailcoats a little bit, you kind of win. But our coat tails, not tailcoats, coat tails. I like tailcoats. I was like, that doesn't make sense. But anyway, all that being said, want to bring that.
to the table today. There's no value to this other than we're interested in it. We thought you might be interested in it. Yeah. And to me, it's just kind of wild. I don't think it's any kind of a reflection on the state of the industry. No, I think it is a reflection on the state of things that need to change in the health care industry from like coding. Yeah. And reimbursement. Yeah. Insurance companies need to be more like forgiving, which they're all trying to make their money. Right. But at the same time, it's a testament to those urgent cares who have
showed up before COVID, survived COVID, or just was able to operate through COVID. And now they're post -COVID and they're still working. But we can tell talking to our urgent cares, there was a every time we, and it's so funny, every time we talked to a new urgent care, like, well, in the COVID days, I was getting over 100 patients a day. And that was crazy. But they also want that number, because they were making bank. You're doing 100 patients a day at one location.
And they're like, I know we can't get back to that, but I want to get close. I'm like, well, it takes money and effort because now that demand has turned down a little bit, right? So now it's back to normal, air quotes, normal. And I think at the end of the day, I bet when Walmart opened up in 2019, they're like, holy cow, this is great because I'm sure it was on fire. I remember down where I used to live, there was these two dentists and one of the dentists closed.
And the other one put up a big banner out front that said, now welcoming Dr. So -and -so's patients. I wonder if you're near Walmart health. If you could put a banner up that says, now welcoming Walmart health patients, because I know you can't run an ad to it, because Walmart's going to flag that for branding, but you can put out a banner. Well, yeah, you put out a banner. Instead of calling it Walmart, you said the Mart Wall. Yeah, something. But no.
Actually, that brings up a point. So also in that recording at the very beginning of this episode, I played the recording, if you go call their number right now. And it also talks about do you need your health records transferred? Call it here. And so like, that's a real thing. So to you guys out there, if you can make that process easy for potential patients, like free record exchange or whatever with your previous star user or whatever, you know, how do you want to phrase it? So you don't get copyright issues.
But that would be huge because we were Sam's Choice Clinic. Yeah. Or however you call it. What is the Walmart brand? I thought it was Sam's Choice or Great Value. Great Value. We are a value urgent care. No, we're better value urgent care. And but anyway, at the end of the day, like trying to make it easy because the because we pharmacies have done this for years. Yeah. Like transfer your prescriptions with ease. One phone call and it's done or fill out this form and we'll take care of it for you. Right.
Same concept. Can you provide that to the patients that are at Walmart Health? Simple, you know, transfer patient records. There we go. I think it's just an opportunity. I think it's worth going after. I don't know if we could run ads against that. The only thing that I know that you could do would be to geofence their locations. If you put Walmart anywhere in there, it's the great like Google platform, Facebook platform, all that's going to flag it. But you can geofence. That's true.
Yeah, I mean, you have 51 locations the G defense for you. That's actually not a bad idea. No. All right, well, guys, we'll thank you all again for listening on it. This was a very like, hey, this happened. Let's chat about it. Love to get feedback on this for sure, because we want to know for those who had a competing Walmart health in your area, how's it affecting your business right now? Did it make a change? Are you seeing like a big uptick or nothing's happened?
Like I want to know what's going on. Like how, how important was that Walmart health clinic in that neighborhood? So, but just as an email at hello patientcaremarketingpros .com and we can chat about it. Maybe bring up another episode. Who knows? But all right. Anything else? No, man. Great episode. I love talking Walmart. I hate it for the people that are closing, but a real opportunity for our urgent cares out there, especially if one of these is closing near you. Yep. All right guys, we'll catch you on the next one. All right. Make it a great week. See you next week.