MMA Presents: Walmart Health - Full Clinic Case Study

Introducing: Walmart Health

After successfuly bringing Walmart Reimagined sites to life and creating a vision of the future, Walmart choose MMA to design and develop Walmart Health. Walmart Health brings quality medical care at low prices and no insurance is required, providing services such as primary care, optometry, dental, phlebotomy, counseling, xray, diagnostic labs and audiology all under one roof

Evidence Based Design (EBD) is the process of basing decisions about the built environment on credible research to achieve the best possible outcomes.

Challenges: How Walmart could utilize its retail know-how to design an integrated and consumer friendly experience. The primary goal is to provide a very diverse set of services under one roof giving Walmart customers, patients, associates and their families the opportunity to easily access what they need, whenever they need it.

Solution: September 13, 2019 Walmart Health Launched its first Primary Care Clinic in Dallas, Georgia. Walmart was able to utilize its retail know-how to design an integrated and consumer friendly experience. Walmart Health offerings include a very diverse set of services under one roof giving Walmart customers and their patients the opportunity to easily access what they need, whenever they need it. Services include cost effective and comprehensive primary care including behavioral health, telehealth, dental, phlebotomy, imaging services, audiology, community health (nutritional services, fitness), health insurance education, clinical and optical services and a newly designed state of the art vision sales and pharmacy.

With the Walmart Clinics in production, MMA was assigned a plethora of new projects. These include, the first: Dallas, Calhoun, Loganville, GA and Springdale, AR to name a few. Live feeds to the construction of these projects can be viewed here. With MMA as its pioneer, these health clinics will pave a way for a new standard in healthcare design. Fitting multiple amenities under one-roof, often in a space of less than 6,500 SF as a rule of thumb. These highly functioning clinics maintain all of their excellent services in a much more economic space.

Accessing Affordable Healthcare

Walmart learns from their numerous community outreach programs during the design process. Customers primarily focus on convenience and consolidation of services under one roof. The primary advantage for the Walmart Health customers includes being affordable, transparent pricing structure, quality of care, and the convenience of extended hours. Walmart’s engagement in the community helped better understand community expectations, build trust and more importantly allowed the community to engage in the process.

Accessing affordable healthcare today is challenging is so many ways. Walmart is helping to dismantle those barriers by allowing it customers to access quality and affordable healthcare. Walmart is leveraging their strengths in health & wellness and working with the right partners to ensure a value-based care model. This in turn is allowing the uninsured and the insured choices that best that fit their needs, including cash and financing options. Service offerings are about 30 to 50 percent less than what people are paying now. Just another way of reinforcing a Walmart staple by being accessible to low-income households.

Live Better Program. Walmart is now providing their employees with a path to higher-paying careers in the growing healthcare field by adding healthcare education. The health and wellness courses include career diploma programs for pharmacy technicians and opticians and seven bachelor’s degrees in health science, health and wellness and healthcare management/administration.

Medical institutions can sometimes create stress by providing unnecessary procedures, wasting time and money and putting patients at risk for complications. More than 1 million American, associates and their families get their medical benefits through Walmart which gives Walmart the opportunity to offer simpler, quality solutions to a large portion of the country.

Appropriate Care is essential to a sustainable healthcare model. This new 14,000 square foot facility can now meet the needs of the patients as well as the needs of the healthcare staff. Since its opening this past September, there has been a tremendous amount feedback from physicians, nurse practitioners, and others delivering healthcare services who are grateful for the clinical space they work in. Leveraging existing strengths in health and wellness and working with the right partners can ensure a value-based sustainable care model and beyond.

Reduce Time to Market. Use of the full-scale mock-ups provided an opportunity to test future-state operational processes. This testing led to many design decisions including, the placement of the various functions within the facility. Ways in maximizing the footprint while offering the various services. Reduction in non-revenue generating spaces such as circulation. MMA’s patented “Hyperpod” was well suited for integration of the primary healthcare exam rooms. This design effectively reduced the linear footage requirements along the outside wall by up to 35%, while still delivering the natural light to patients. Everything from floor finishes, ceiling finishes, casework were continually being explored and tested within the mock-up.

Testing Multiple Options for prototyping were implemented as well. Before the mock-up was built, virtual reality provided numerous advantages over physical mock-ups. MMA’s ability to effectively use 3D visualization technology was an economical alternative to quickly simulate and study layouts. MMA was able to test the functionality of the room by wearing head-mounted display allowing any individual to physically immerse themselves within the virtual space to test the design without physically building one. Virtual Reality proved to complement and drive the design of the physical mock-up and continues to do so today. The intricate and detailed animations continually helped fill in the missing blanks for designers and the associated Walmart design team. Collectively we were able to make informed decisions on the design but more importantly how interfaces should be built and help uncover potential constructability problems. Walmart is and continues to be, a Forward-Thinking Company! MMA is exceptionally proud of being selected as the Lead Healthcare Design Team for this project. We thank all the internal Walmart contributors and the associated Walmart consultants, Camp5, Anderson Retail, Regency Lighting, HFA, CPH, Fitch, Henry Schein, Del Medical, Imaging Physics, Steelcase, Sevan, and RA Rogers. Without them, this project would never have been as successful as it is.