Former Walt Disney Imagineer Helps Makes Dreams a Reality for Walmart Health

Walmart Health announced Friday a new health initiative to make health and wellness more accessible to its customers, especially in rural areas. Walmart Health, which launched at a new facility in Dallas, Georgia, adjacent to a Walmart store, will provide primary care, dental care, behavioral health services, diagnostics and more.

Walmart Health & Wellness CEO & President, Sean Slovenski said in a statement that, “We are creating a super center for basic healthcare services.”

The clinic marks Walmart’s first significant innovation in the retail healthcare space since the opening of its care clinics. It’s part of a larger strategy to provide more convenience to busy working families who shop at Walmart, providing quality service, convenience, value and transparent pricing.

The vision of the Walmart Health clinic became a reality thanks in part to Shawn Nason and his team at Nason Group, which led sprints that focused on human-centered design, especially around the areas of empathy for both the future customers and the healthcare providers at Walmart.

“The core of what Nason does is to “involve customers through the whole journey,” explains Slovenksi. In a field with many regulations, institutional history of how things have always been done and a competitive marketplace, Shawn and his team helped our team imagine what was possible and then make it a reality.”

Nason, a former Disney Imagineer who later led innovation work for Humana and his team supported Walmart Health through its various iteration processes and provided training and experience design concepts for the team as they worked to build and staff the Dallas Clinic.

“The Walmart Health team absolutely had the skills and the expertise to make Walmart Health happen,” Nason explained. “They just needed the permission to dream it and then do it.”

If the first clinic in Dallas is successful, Walmart plans to open additional retail clinics in its U.S. footprint. Nason Group is already working with Walmart on what comes next.