Walmart is not just a store; you could literally live in one. The super-supplier offers a host of products ranging all over the spectrum of necessity, including food, clothes, hygiene products, home furnishings, you name it. Some Walmart stores even offer fast food from Subway, a nail salon, an arcade, an eyeglass store, and all contained within Walmart.
But there’s no doctor’s office in Walmart, you say, what would you do if you got sick? You couldn’t really live there!
Okay, well now you definitely can. Walmart is offering telemedicine services in selected stores that will employ videoconferencing technology to connect patients with doctors. Shopping for a new pair of headphones, or camping gear, or any of the other millions of Walmart products, you start to feel a little sick. Now you can get yourself checked out without ever having to leave the store.
Walmart spokesperson Deisha Galberth Barnett explains the idea behind the seemingly random move, “Our goal is to offer products and services that lead to a positive, one-stop-shopping experience for our customers. This includes convenient, affordable access to health care services in two of our Pennsylvania stores through Telemed Ventures.”
The chain that changed the meaning of “one-stop shopping” is now changing it further, and the change is slowly spreading through the company’s vast network of stores. The services will be provided initially at Walmarts in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, but there are plans for expansion throughout Pennsylvania and perhaps beyond.
The way it works is the telehealth provider Telemed Ventures will lease space in Walmart stores and set up telecommunication technology used for videoconferencing between doctors and patients. BCS Global Networks is a technology partner of Telemed Ventures, so the two are collaborating on this project.
BCS Global will enable lifelike, virtual face-to-face interfaces to hold examinations, available through the company’s Smart Care Doc technology. Telemed Ventures, meanwhile, will provide the doctors and nurses.
The business venture will allow patients to pay 59 dollars to see a “teledoctor,” which is reportedly 40 percent less than the same services cost at other similar clinics.
Clive Sawkins, CEO of BCS Global said in a statement, “This innovative service eliminates the patient's burden of having to travel to out-of-the-way clinics, or sit in waiting rooms anticipating whether their name will be called next.”
The technology involved will establish electronic health records (EHR) and put a patient’s personal health records (PHR) online, accessible on home computers and tablets but only by the patient in question. The specific technology involved uses a virtual private cloud computing model provided by Amazon in order to store collected patient information and data.
Darrell Jennings, chief operating officer at Telemed Ventures, summed up the technological process in an interview.
“We collect the patients' vitals with devices that are electronically tied to the computer at the clinic and then all those vitals are uploaded into the patients' medical record in the cloud,” he said. “The doctor sees that information during the videoconferencing session and, based on the information, the doctor can make a diagnosis, prepare an electronic prescription, enter notes into the EHR, and if the patient needs further attention, refer a patient to a specialist.”
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
