What started as a self insured employer based program to cover Wal Mart employees at reduced costs has grown into one of the country's largest demonstration projects for comprehensive health care. Begun in 2002, Wal Mart officials, acting on behalf of their 40,000 employees, created a self funded employer health plan and negotiated with large national physician specialist chains to provide specialty care and hospital services as part of that plan. The primary care physicians and physician extender staff have come from the primary care initiative funded at the University of Arkansas Medical School by the Wal Mart Foundation. The Medical School trains medical students, nurse practitioners, and physicians whose education is underwritten by the Foundation. The primary care practitioners can repay their schooling costs by joining the Physicians Foundation and agreeing to work at one of the Wal Mart Medical Centers, located in one of the Wal Mart Super Centers.
Practitioners are able to request one of three locations in which to be placed.
Using demographic and recruitment data from studies as early as the 1970's the Medical School supports the project through its aggressive computer based recruitment program. The needs of the rural community come first, so physicians and extenders agree to be moved no more often than once every five years for a maximum of three moves in their career. The delivery network is tied together with the advanced Wal Med communications and information tracking system. Fashioned after the point of sales inventory computer techniques developed in the 1990's the computer network provides primary care and specialist treatment protocols based on immediate input and analysis of treatment modalities, diagnoses, and outcomes reported from the 1000 sites. Within hours abnormalities, outliers, and non responsive treatments and cases are compared to the more than 115 million entries in the computer system.