Retailers and Health Systems Can Improve Care Together

The Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath have starkly highlighted the shortcomings of health care delivery in the United States and many other countries: rapidly growing costs, inconsistent quality, and inadequate and unequal access to primary and other types of care. However, if retailers and health systems were to forge strong partnerships, they could play a major role in addressing these megachallenges. While some retail–health care partnerships exist—for example, one between Target and Kaiser Permanente in Southern California began in 2014—they are rare and have only scratched the surface of their potential. To fundamentally change how health care is delivered, more of these partnerships are needed, and many of those that exist must be reoriented toward a different goal. Rather than focusing on the direct-to-consumer model that retailers have largely employed to provide a handful of basic services, the partnerships must offer much broader care. They should, of course, target the needs of consumers, but they must also help employers and insurers manage the overall health—and health care spending—of the populations they cover. In this article, we make the case for these partnerships and highlight four key actions that retailers and health systems must take to achieve this larger goal.