Anthem, Walmart Announced MA Partnership

From Health Plan Weekly

On Aug. 20, Anthem, Inc. announced an arrangement with Walmart Inc. to increase Medicare Advantage (MA) members' access to over-the-counter (OTC) medicines and health services and products. It’s a move an expert at KPMG describes as "a natural" fit that may signal a return to using partnerships to introduce new products, rather than full-fledged M&A.

Under the Anthem/Walmart program, starting in January 2019, Anthem's MA enrollees will be able to use "OTC plan allowances" to buy OTC medications and health-related items such as pain relievers and first aid supplies at one of Walmart’s 4,700 stores or through its website.

This latest collaboration further emphasizes Anthem's commitment to MA, a program in which the insurer has more than 1 million members, Leerink analyst Ana Gupte, Ph.D., said in an Aug. 20 note. She notes that Anthem's Walmart partnership "stopped short of retail clinics and is also complementary to Anthem’s retail platform, CareMore for Seniors, and complex populations and strengthens Anthem's retail branding, clinical care delivery and distribution in MA."

For major retailers with very large geographic footprints, "there's always been a natural collaboration with the Blues," says Ashraf Shehata, a principal in KPMG's health care life sciences advisory practice.

According to Shehata, the bottom-line question is how to take a long-standing relationship to create new market opportunities. "We've become accustomed to large mergers with large organizations in health care," he says. "This kind of announcement is more along the lines of how health care traditionally was done — through partnerships."

Pharma enters into the equation, too. "The other thing I like about the news is many organizations on the retail side are building generic preferred formularies," Shehata says. "But retailers need to go beyond that with specialty pharmacy [and] be able to leverage retail and health insurance footprints, [which] is happening in these MA partnerships."

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