Will Walmart’s Medicare Advantage Play Succeed?
Walmart is piloting a digital badge to help Medicare Advantage members identify "food-as-medicine" eligible items — a move blending AI, healthcare, and retail.
As always, this segment is brought to you by our friends at the A&M Consumer and Retail Group, Simbe, Mirakl, Ocampo Capital, Infios, and Clear Demand — the companies helping retailers win smarter, faster.
For the full episode head here: https://youtu.be/rJh3sY4_BsU
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Transcript
Walmart has introduced a virtual badge to help Medicare Advantage members identify items they can buy with their OTC benefits.
Speaker A:According to Retail Dive, people can add their benefit cards to their virtual Walmart wallets to access a digital experience that includes a product badge and search filter to identify items that are eligible for those benefits when shopping in stores.
Speaker A:The badge will appear when people scan eligible items barcodes with the Walmart app, the retailer's Quote Benefits Program Eligible End quote badge appears on a wide variety of over the counter food and wellness products such as meal replacement shakes, ground coffee, vitamins and cold and flu medication.
Speaker A:Customers can also access a tracker that lets them monitor their unused benefits.
Speaker A:Walmart said the Everyday Health Signals platform can enhance the well being of Medicare Advantage customers by providing information that can help them make healthier choices.
Speaker A:By analyzing their Walmart purchases.
Speaker A:The AI powered tool can provide the customer with the nutrition analysis and shopping list.
Speaker A:Chris, this is also the A and M put you on the spot right away here.
Speaker A:Bright and early in Barcelona.
Speaker A:A and M wants to know three.
Speaker B:Hours of sleep in Barcelona.
Speaker B:Yes, let's start off hot.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker A:A and M says we recognize and applaud Walmart's efforts to help Medicare members reduce the billions of dollars of their annually forfeited over the counter benefits.
Speaker A:And given this is a digital only virtual wallet and barcode scanning discovery process, is the overlap big enough yet between Medicare members and digital savviness to meaningfully succeed in this effort?
Speaker A:What a beautifully worded question.
Speaker A:And now I'll let you take the stage and provide an answer.
Speaker B:Yeah, thank you Ann.
Speaker B:Thank you.
Speaker B:That's so kind of you.
Speaker B:So, yeah, I mean my answer to that question is is yes.
Speaker B:Yes it does.
Speaker B:I think it, I think it will be meaningful.
Speaker B:And the reason I say that from Walmart's perspective, because the bar is incredibly low.
Speaker B:All you're talking about here is software.
Speaker B:You're deploying software.
Speaker B:So any usage you get on this is.
Speaker B:Is gravy.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:And the cost of trying to do this, I imagine is not prohibitively expensive.
Speaker B:And the upside if you get people to use it is incredibly credibly high.
Speaker B:And digital wallets, while, while still new for some, are, you know, gaining more and more traction each and every day.
Speaker B:So that's why I laud this move because it's a trend we talked about.
Speaker B:You know, I said at the outset food is medicine that we're only going to hear more about because the number one answer to everything and everything in the world is money.
Speaker B:And there's a lot of money to be claimed for programs like these that is just going unused quite frankly.
Speaker B:So, and I've been talking to a lot of companies recently.
Speaker B:I've been talking to I spending, I've actually been, it's funny this headline came up because I've been spending a lot of time with a company called Sifter and probably spent four hours with them in the last month just talking about this topic.
Speaker B:And they're a company that helps retailers identify items based on their nutritional ingredients and everything.
Speaker B:And so we were talking about like this similar use case for GLP1.
Speaker B:Like how do you help customers identify GLP1 friendly items very quickly?
Speaker B:And there's a merchandising use case in that.
Speaker B:So the last part I'd say is I, I just love this too because it 100% aligns with Walmart's brand promise of save money, live better and that's what the world needs is right now.
Speaker B:And so I, I, I just can't do anything but applaud this.
Speaker B:I think, I think it's a great move and they're just going to learn from doing it too.
Speaker B:That's the other thing.
Speaker B:So like there's, there's no risk here.
Speaker A:Yeah, no, I, I agree.
Speaker A:I think it's really smart.
Speaker A:I think you, you're, you hit on it right at the beginning when you said like it's all, there's only benefit that comes from this.
Speaker A:Sure they might not see the adoption early on that they were hoping but it puts them in to be prepared for even the next generation which may be in a year or two, even where people are starting to use an app based platform to do shopping especially, especially as search behaviors are changing.
Speaker A:I think yes, they may not start to adopt some of the, the apps right away but if Walmart's thinking about this now, it's not only valuable like to them I think in an app, but it also helps their ecosystem prepare for searches like the ones you're talking about where people are saying are there products that qualify for Medicare Advantage?
Speaker A:And can you build me a shopping list and a meal planning tool for the week that includes those products?
Speaker A:Like that's a very real search term that anyone could be searching on Walmart right now.
Speaker A:And so I think it's natural, the natural progression is yes, now you go to the Walmart app to, to fulfill that shopping journey.
Speaker A:And finally I think this is also something, I imagine that they could start to put on the digital shelf labels that they're going to be rolling out soon too.
Speaker A:Like there's There's a place there potentially they could be putting some of this information.
Speaker A:I know they've already started to do this with promos or even snap an EBT eligible item.
Speaker A:So I think there's a state where this could go.
Speaker A:And so the key point here is they're preparing about it, they're thinking about it right now and retailers around the globe should really be paying attention to thinking about their own investments here in this type of data about the products.
Speaker A:It's now no longer just about ingredients anymore.
Speaker A:It's about the other, the other queries that will be coming up or how people are going to be searching for the products.
Speaker B:Yeah, no, it's a great point.
Speaker B:It's about, it comes back to item data and getting your item data cataloged in similar ways like this.
Speaker B:Because you're right.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:I mean ChatGPT's usage rates are through the roof and people are going to start doing searches like that, whether it's on Walmart or through the generative AI interfaces.
Speaker B:The other point I'd make in closing too, and we've talked a lot on the show about investments in, in store clinics and things like that, you know, I think this is a much simpler way to go about it and to make a palpably diff, you know, meaningful difference in people's lives, relatively speaking too.
Speaker B:So I think, you know, it's, it's smart.
Speaker B:I think we're going to see more people jumping on this bandwagon.
Speaker A:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker A:I hadn't even thought about that.
Speaker A:But you're absolutely right.
Speaker A:Like it's a way that they can gets back to your live better part of their, their promise.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:You don't have to spend any money on physical infrastructure to make this happen, you know, as well, which is, you know, very, very enticing way to think about how do you capture the money that's going around in the healthcare and the food is medicine trend?
