Amazon, One Medical and the Acquisitions Moving Healthcare: Walmart’s Former SVP of Health, Marcus Osborne, Weighs In

Marcus Osborne started his professional life as a White House
intern and never intended to pursue a career in healthcare. In
fact, he says he has a phobia of needles and doesn’t find much
pleasure in daily work dealing with issues like insurance and
disease. But he says healthcare kept finding him, and he admits
that no other sector has more need for good, talented people
trying their best to make progress.

After a couple jobs in business consulting and time as Chief
Financial Officer for the Clinton Foundation’s Health Access
Initiative, Marcus landed at Walmart, where he ultimately became
Senior Vice President of Healthcare Transformation. In January
2022, he stepped down from that role after spending 15 years at
the world’s largest retailer driving key initiatives to increase
healthcare access and affordability, including helping to launch
Walmart Health and leading Walmart Health clinics.

In this episode of Healthcare is Hard, Keith Figlioli taps into
the knowledge and experience Marcus has gained through his career
to explore issues including: 



Viewing healthcare through the consumer’s eyes. Looking
back on his time at Walmart, Marcus says it was the best place
to work on transforming healthcare since it is fundamentally a
consumer company. But he also says it was sometimes the worst
place given all the other competing priorities outside of
healthcare at such a large organization. Marcus credits some of
his biggest successes to one simple idea – that consumers are
very clear about what they want, and what their challenges are.
You just have to listen, and deliver.


Retailer acquisitions. In addition to shedding light on
the inner workings of Walmart and its ambitions to grow in the
healthcare market, Marcus talks about the moves other
retailers, including Amazon and CVS, are making through
acquisitions. He views Amazon’s acquisition of One Medical as a
Brilliant move that gives the company excellent operating
talent around primary care, a physical presence to continue
building the omnichannel healthcare experience, and strong
value-based care components through One Medical’s earlier
acquisition of Iora Health. He says the strategy is a home run,
and talks about how it now comes down to integrating and
execution.


The future for health systems. Marcus and Keith talk
about the idea of a health system as a community integrator.
Instead of owning assets, they ponder the benefits for health
systems that get better at partnering with outside
organizations in deeper, more collaborative ways. For example,
as the industry moves towards value-based care beyond Medicare,
Marcus sees a big opportunity for health systems to create more
efficiencies by being the community integrator around specialty
practices in areas such as cardiology, maternity or
musculosketal health.


The opportunities for entrepreneurs: The great news for
entrepreneurs, according to Marcus, is that the big players are
far from figuring everything out. He compares the current state
of healthcare innovation to the Internet in the 1990s where
there was a tremendous amount of innovation and companies were
focused on developing the best point solutions. For example,
there were dozens of search engines, from Yahoo, to Google,
Excite, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves and many more. But Google
ultimately emerged to unify the back end of search for
everyone. Today in healthcare, Marcus points out how it’s
becoming harder for consumers to learn how to deal with all the
individual solutions in the market, and says they’re starting
to look for someone to integrate everything for them.



To hear Keith and Marcus talk about these topics and more, listen
to this episode of Healthcare is Hard: A Podcast for Insiders.