Walmart is partnering with San Jose, California-based Health at Scale to offer employees and families covered by Walmart’s health plan personalized recommendations for health providers.

The collaboration announced Monday by Health at Scale, an AI company, comes as the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retail giant has been busy expanding its healthcare offerings for employees and customers alike.

“Provider choice is perhaps the single most important decision when it comes to improving outcomes and reducing costs for patients. It is widely understood that provider choice is not a one-size-fits-all problem and needs deep personalization,” Health at Scale CEO Zeeshan Syed said in an email. “No two patients are alike – with widely varying health conditions, preferences and needs. Some providers may be well-suited for certain patients but not for others. Despite this, typical approaches for finding providers are not personalized.”

And that’s just what the company aims to do for Walmart-covered employees and their families in locations where Health at Scale is offered. Syed said the company’s technology deployments are nationwide, but that he wasn’t able to share more details about where Walmart employees could access Health at Scale immediately Monday.

There’s no shortage of companies offering would-be patients ways to evaluate doctors from Zocdoc to Healthgrades.

But Health at Scale, which was founded by machine learning and clinical faculty from MIT, Harvard, Stanford and the University of Michigan, positions itself as breaking the mold of online rankings and ratings for doctors and volume-based metrics by using AI and machine learning.

“Using AI, Health at Scale can model patient-provider matches that factor in the historical performance of providers with patients with similar kinds of health characteristics … and identify choices that are well-matched to each patient’s unique health factors,” Syed said.

He added that by optimizing this patient-provider match there’s a tremendous opportunity to improve patient care.

A Walmart executive echoed Syed.

“Customizing services and treatments to individual needs is the next frontier in healthcare and is a major part of Walmart’s commitment to helping associates and their family members find great doctors who consistently deliver the best value and quality care in their community,” Lisa Woods, vice president of Walmart’s U.S. benefits division, said in a statement.

Back in 2019, Health at Scale announced that it had raised $16 million from Optum, the sole investor in its Series A funding round.

A partnership with Health at Scale wasn’t the only collaboration news that involved Walmart Monday. Quest Diagnostics also announced that it’s collaborating with the retailer to increase access to high-quality lab testing. It’s doing that through a consumer-friendly website, building on a longstanding relationship between the two companies.

Consumers can visit Walmart.com to select and purchase a lab test from any connected computer or mobile device at any time.

“Each purchase is reviewed and, if appropriate, ordered by a licensed physician,” Quest said in a news release announcing the collaboration.

Depending on the test, a person will be prompted to schedule an appointment at one of Quest’s 2,220 Patient Service Centers across the country, including locations at select Walmart stores. Quest noted that depending on location, those appointments are often available that same day. Quest provides at-home collection kits for certain tests with instructions on how to use them.

The announcement from Quest is in keeping with the trends in the diagnostics world, where the preeminence of centralized labs is waning.

“Now more than ever, people seek healthcare that is convenient, individualized and meets them where they are,” said Steve Rusckowski, Quest Diagnostics chairman, president and CEO, in a statement. “This new solution can broaden access to laboratory testing and health insights, and support for a range of conditions for potentially better outcomes.”

Photo credit: Walmart