Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1353232
62 CIO / HEALTH IT Amazon, Walmart & more: 5 retail giants' virtual care strategies By Jackie Drees F rom making telemedicine more con- sumer friendly to increasing access to care during the pandemic, retail giants including Amazon, Walmart and Walgreens are ramping up their virtual care initiatives and innovating the healthcare delivery system. Here are 11 things to know about Walmart, Amazon, Sam's Club, CVS and Walgreens' telehealth expansions. Amazon 1. Amazon Care launched in 2019 to provide telemedicine and in-person primary care ser- vices to Amazon employees in Seattle and later expanded to all employees. On March 3, Amazon Care partnered with several health systems, including Salt Lake City-based Iter- mountain Healthcare and St. Louis-based Ascension, to create a healthcare coalition to expand home-based clinical care. e group, dubbed Moving Health Home, will support and update healthcare policy changes to des- ignate the home as a site of clinical service 2. Amazon Care grew its business develop- ment team in 2020, a possible indication the company is looking to expand its online med- ical clinic. In October 2020, Amazon Care posted several job openings for business de- velopment managers, a role that is responsible for growing relationships within the commer- cial and public sectors. 3. Amazon also inked telehealth partner- ships with BestBuy and primary care clinic chain Crossover Health in 2020. In July 2020, Amazon and Crossover teamed up to pilot health clinics for employees featuring virtual or in-person visits. e retail giant then part- nered with BestBuy in September to launch a telehealth-enabled flip phone for use with Amazon Alexa voice assistance to help con- nect older adults to healthcare services. Sam's Club 4. Sam's Club inked a partnership with prima- ry care telehealth provider 98point6 in Sep- tember 2020 to offer members $1 telehealth visits. Sam's Club members can now sign up for telehealth visits through 98point6's text- based app; the store offers a $20 quarterly subscription for the first three months and then switches to $33.50 every three months. With the subscription, members get unlimit- ed telehealth visits for $1 per visit. Walmart 5. In January 2020, Walmart expanded its benefits available through its telehealth pro- gram, which offers $4 virtual care visits via Doctor on Demand's platform. e program is available to employees in Colorado, Minne- sota and Wisconsin. 6. e Department of Veterans Affairs in July 2020 said it plans to ramp up its tele- health services at Walmart locations across the country aer the COVID-19 pandemic winds down. CVS 7. CVS Health added $59 telehealth visits for customers in Georgia and Massachusetts through the retail giant's MinuteClinics in July 2020. Most Aetna insurance plans cover the cost of the telehealth visits. 8. This January, CVS Health rolled out a medical alert system, named Symphony, designed to protect seniors living at home. The system uses in-home and wearable sensors to monitor for falls, motion and room temperature and also provides 24/7 personal emergency response when need- ed. Its voice-activated hub also lets seniors make hands-free calls with caregivers or emergency responders. Walgreens 9. Walgreens added new telehealth providers and a COVID-19 risk assessment tool to its Find Care platform in April 2020 to coordinate care for patients. e app lets patients connect with more than 30 providers for virtual visits. 10. In July 2020, Walgreens Boots Alliance invested $1 billion in VillageMD to add full-service primary care physician offices and telehealth services to hundreds of co-located clinics across the U.S. 11. Walgreens and VillageMD in December 2020 said they would open 40 Village Medi- cal at Walgreens primary care clinics by the end of summer 2021. e retail giant said it plans to open 500 to 700 VillageMD clinics in more than 30 U.S. markets in the next five years. n Mass General uses EHRs to create COVID-19 death risk prediction tool By Jackie Drees M ass General Hospital researchers used medical histories of patients collected and stored in EHRs combined with artificial intelligence technology to predict patients' probability of dying from COVID-19. The Boston-based hospital's analytics and medical team used COVID-19 data and medical records from more than 16,000 patients and applied a computer algorithm to identify 46 clinical conditions representing potential risk factors for death after a COVID-19 infection. Potential risk factors for death in COVID-19 patients include age, history of pneumonia, gender, race and comorbidities like diabetes and cancer, accord- ing to the study, which was published Feb. 4 in npj Digital Medicine. "By combining computational methods and clinical expertise, we developed a set of models to forecast the most severe COVID-19 outcomes based on past medical records, and to help understand the differences in risk factors across age groups," said Hossein Estiri, PhD, co-lead author of the study and comput- er science lab investigator at MGH, according to a news release. Dr. Estiri said that while many prior studies have isolated small subsets of EHR data after the infection, MGH's study "is the first and largest to use entire his- torical medical records to try to untangle the role of age as the most important risk factor for COVID adverse outcomes." n