Mercy Health Clinics Open in Former Walmart Health Locations Across Arkansas

Mercy opened three health clinics in Walmart SuperCenters, including one in Springdale, which held its ribbon cutting on Elm Springs Road in November. (Provided)

Three Mercy health clinics are up and running in Arkansas at locations that were formerly Walmart Health centers.

Walmart opened its first Health center in Georgia in 2019 with grand plans to open hundreds more during the ensuing years. However, cost considerations and other challenges caused Walmart to announce in April 2024 that it was shuttering its 51 Health centers and closing its virtual care platform.

In their place, a myriad of replacements have stepped up, including Mercy of St. Louis, which opened up clinics in Springdale, Rogers and Fort Smith at Walmart SuperCenters. Humana announced it would fill 23 former Walmart locations in Florida, and Access Medical Clinic in Jonesboro opened a clinic at a Walmart site in Palestine, Texas, on Jan. 10.

“Well, hopefully it’s sort of an advantage for everybody, not just Mercy,” said Lance Faddis, Mercy’s regional physician executive for primary care. “Clinic space is always a premium, no matter where you are. Our goal really is access. If we can increase access and make that access more convenient to our patients, that’s really where the advantage is.

“Hopefully, it’s a great partnership. Walmart is interested in the health of the community and how they impact that. The two of us together should be able to provide clear and convenient access to patients for a lot of different reasons.”

When Walmart announced the closures, it said in a news release that it wasn’t a “sustainable business model” for the retailer, based in Bentonville. Walmart said a “challenging reimbursement environment and escalating operating costs” caused the venture to fail.

Those are still challenges Mercy, Access Medical Clinic and Humana and any other future partner will face.

“The health care industry is different than any other business industry,” Faddis said. “The margins are not great. The advantage for us is we’ve been in this health care business for roughly 200 years.

“So, we’ve been doing this a while, and we feel like we have a good system in place. We understand value-based health care, which is really important if you’re going to health care in this day and age.”

Rural Pilot

Brad Bibb, the CEO of Access Medical Clinic, said his organization has an advantage because AMC has earned a Rural Health Clinic designation for its Palestine clinic.

A RHC tag means the clinic can receive higher reimbursement rates for Medicare and Medicaid services. AMC is also opening four clinics in Walmart SuperCenters, two each in Oklahoma and Indiana that were not previously home to Walmart Health centers.

“We had talked to Walmart about putting clinics in rural areas [previously], and then, when they announced they were closing their 51 clinics, we reached back out to them,” Bibb said. “Their model is totally different than ours, but of their 51 clinics, almost none of them qualify for Rural Health Clinics status.

“Most clinics don’t want to see Medicare and Medicaid [patients] because it’s a little reimbursement. That’s kind of our niche.”

Bibb said AMC will provide all the traditional services of a primary care clinic at its 800-SF Palestine location. He hopes to control overhead expenses, which can be crushing in the medical industry.

“Our question is, because they’re in a Walmart, does that get us enough foot traffic volume?” Bibb said. “We know what happens in our standalone clinics, but in a Walmart, we don’t know. We’ll have two to three employees there, so it’s very low overhead. That’s our model.

“We need a very small amount of patients to break even.”

Faddis said Mercy will also start with a tight operation and then expand as business grows.

He said two of the new clinics have a doctor and nurse practitioner on duty while the third has a nurse practitioner.

“We don’t start with the full complement of everybody you could possibly fit in that clinic,” Faddis said. “We grow it over time, just like you would any other business. We’re all very pleased with the way it’s going. We’re pleased with our numbers.”