Walmart Launches Autoimmune-Focused Specialty Pharmacies of the Community

In an interview with Pharmacy Times, Aleata Postell, group director of pharmacy business development and head of specialty pharmacy at Walmart, discussed the new autoimmune-focused specialty pharmacies of the community (SPOCs). Postell said these pharmacies bring high-touch specialty pharmacies into local communities for patients with more complex needs.

Q: What is a specialty pharmacy of the community?

Aleata Postell: Absolutely. So, from my history, a specialty pharmacy central model has high touch care provided for specialty pharmacies. Our specialty pharmacy of community takes that care and brings it to our communities, where we have a Walmart retail pharmacy. And what we've done is we've trained our pharmacy teams—so both our pharmacists and our pharmacy technicians—on conditions of focus in those communities. So, we started with HIV, and now what we've done is expanded that to autoimmune conditions.

Q: What does that model look like for the pharmacists and technicians in these pharmacies?

Aleata Postell: Sure. So, what it looks like, if you think about what the specialty pharmacy needs are for a patient, whether it's that mental health support, nutrition support, or more. But taking a step further, taking it from a central model in our community pharmacy, our pharmacists can actually also do injections. So, for example, you have a rheumatoid arthritis patient, they're experiencing a flare and hard to give themselves the injections, or just even caregiver training. We take that a step further, where our pharmacy teams can actually deliver that service for the patients, but they're also able to help them with their OTC needs that they may need to manage their flares and also provide nutritional support. And when you come to Walmart, you can get all those things in one place. And so, when we started working on our specialty pharmacies of the community, we wanted to leverage our assets and what we do well and bring that together to provide the services for our autoimmune patients.

Walmart pharmacy | Image credit: The Toidi | stock.adobe.com

Q: What does the expansion of autoimmune-focused SPOCs mean for Walmart and its patients?

Aleata Postell: So, an autoimmune patient is living with complex, life-altering condition. In a patient that has Crohn disease, there's a number of things that they have to think about when they're caring for their needs or if they're experiencing any type of joint pain. So, when we look at rheumatoid arthritis, we look at Crohn, we look at ulcerative colitis, our goal was, how do we bring the right services together to make sure that the patients have all the care that they need from our specialty pharmacies of the community, and make sure that they can live better in providing the additional health outcomes that they may not always receive? And 4000 of our locations are in areas that have been defined as underserved, and so as we looked at where we would put our specialty pharmacies of the community, meeting that need, especially in those underserved areas, was important to us, especially with over 50 million Americans suffering from some sort of autoimmune condition.

Q: How did Walmart identify the need for these SPOCs?

Aleata Postell: Putting our locations in the right place was important for us. Looking at COVID-19, we identified that we had a number of patients that needed some sort of care, especially if they have an immune system that's already compromised. And during COVID-19, we trusted the pharmacists that stepped up and immunized our patients across America. Taking that a step further, when I think about autoimmune conditions, sometimes you have to titrate your dose, so that first dose is really important, and understanding what goes into that. And then also, you're delivering the medication to the patient and you're hoping that they're taking it right, or their caregiver is able to give it right. And so, our goal was, how do we take that out of it? We're taking the findings and the learnings that we had during COVID-19 and creating a program that could help our patients feel very comfortable with their condition, in being able to treat it, but also providing them the guidance and insights, whether it's through a community health worker that can provide them with additional services outside of dispensing, as I referenced before, or nutrition programs, because we felt that was so important to the autoimmune conditions that we're servicing. And so, when we identified our locations, it was, could they meet the needs of that community? Was there a need in that community? Did they have the services that we can provide? We were very intentional about our approach, so I'm excited to see the expansion, plus everything that we've learned along the way on the role of the pharmacist and the pharmacy team when it came to COVID-19, applying that into specialty conditions, and taking it a step further. And actually being able to administer that care was really important in our strategy.

Q: Can you discuss the autoimmune focus? What does that entail and how does that affect the business for these SPOCs?

Aleata Postell: Absolutely. So, if you think about autoimmune conditions, it's grown a lot over the years. It's increased 451% over the last 10 years. When I came to Walmart and I started looking at the number of patients that were coming into our pharmacies in our communities, we had a number of patients that were coming in to get care. And so, when we thought through, do you disrupt the patients and move them to a central model, or do you bring the care to them? It was an easy choice: bring the care to them. And so, we built upon the program that we had already started in 2021 that was focused on HIV and added on autoimmune. It was an easy choice as we looked at what support mechanisms we had to have in place in order to really treat an autoimmune condition and the role that our pharmacies can play. Plus, as I shared earlier, looking at the assets, you're coming to Walmart already for your grocery and everyday household needs, if we can take that and pair it with your pharmacy needs, then we have a model that can help patients live better. And so that was the goal of the program when we started it.

Q: How do you foresee these SPOCs impacting their communities as well as Walmart pharmacy?

Aleata Postell: These specialty pharmacies of the community are part of the community, right? It's in the name. So, our pharmacists live there. They are part of it. They know the needs of their communities. They're a trusted part of their communities. So, I just see it as being a kind of a seamless relationship. Today, they may have a patient that comes in with a specialty condition, and they're already treating them for other comorbidities that they may have. So, allowing them to be able to treat the whole patient was really important as well, because our pharmacists are really skilled already. I can tell you, just go into any of our pharmacies and you talk to the pharmacist manager there, or any of our clinical services managers, they know exactly what the needs are in that community, and they know the resources and tools that they need to be able to support [patients]. And so, I just see us continuing to expand and really doubling down and making sure that we're helping patients to live their best life.

Q: Is there anything you’d like to add?

Aleata Postell: I think one of the things I will share is in my history with specialty pharmacy—I've come from various different models—we are seeing specialty pharmacy evolve. And at Walmart, we're positioned to make sure that we're meeting that need. And again, the learnings that we had from COVID-19 and the trust that the pharmacies have when it came to being able to deliver care, that is what's going into our program. And I'm really excited to be here and to be a part of this journey and to make sure that we are using our assets in the best way to help patients in their overall health journey.