Walmart May Need Humana Patients To Fill Emptying Retail Space
As online shopping continues to eat away at traditional brick and mortar retailers, Walmart may need Humana health plan enrollees to fill its store with patients in need of healthcare services.
That’s a theory floated in a report from Credit Suisse’s A.J. Rice and colleagues who said they recently hosted a former Walmart executive who offered the longtime healthcare analyst and his team thoughts on how a partnership with Humana would help the retail giant.
“(Walmart) would like to see more of overall healthcare spending take place in its locations, while making sure on the other hand that it protects its current related activities, particularly in the midst of a changing landscape,” Rice and Credit Suisse associates wrote in a note last week. “As the need for traditional retail space has evolved due to the proliferation of online shopping , there is a perception that some space within the footprint of an average store could be used to offer new and non-traditional services, such as healthcare.”
Humana releases its first quarter earnings next week when the insurer could face questions from Wall Street analysts about recent Walmart speculation. Humana has more than 14 million people in its health plans.
Filling available space with health services is already part of the strategy of Walgreens Boots Alliance and CVS Health. CVS is working its way through an acquisition of Aetna, the nation’s third-largest health insurer, and both parties say they want to develop more healthcare services that would be covered by the health plan for its more than 20 million members.
Walgreens is “opening up more space” for healthcare services such as the attached urgent care centers run by UnitedHealth Group’s MedExpress that connect primary care with the corner drugstore. The partnership has grown to 15 locations.
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