Nearly nine years ago, @TJParker and I went to Bentonville to talk to @Walmart about building a different kind of pharmacy. While we were there, we visited The Walmart Museum. If you haven’t been, go! I loved seeing the history of a company that started with a single store and changed what people everywhere could buy and afford. We were building PillPack at the time, and spent much of that trip talking about what healthcare could learn from retail. Today we’re launching the new Walmart Better Care Services, a healthcare store powered by General Medicine. Starting today, customers can browse more than 900 products and services across a dozen different provider groups, compare cash and estimated insurance prices, and get what they need. Walmart defined the experience, chose the products, services, and providers. Our technology makes it all shoppable. A lot has happened since that first trip. We sold PillPack, built Amazon Pharmacy, and started @GeneralMedicine. We’ve spent most of our working lives trying to make getting healthcare easier. And somehow it still feels like we’re just getting started. We have incredible clinicians and treatments in this country. But finding the right care, figuring out what something costs, and actually getting it remains convoluted and complicated. Something that should have been a quick purchase becomes a project. Too often, people just put it off altogether. And when the problem is serious, all that hassle lands on top of what’s already hard. When transactions are easy, you take a whole layer of complexity off the table. We launched General Medicine a year and a half ago. A few weeks ago, we wrote about the idea behind it: healthcare needs a store. Helping Walmart build one for its customers is that idea reaching the scale we’ve been aiming at since PillPack. I love that we have our own store. We get to build things we’ve wanted to exist for years, hear directly from customers, and keep making them better. But I’m just as excited about helping other companies build theirs. We learned at PillPack how much more you can do when you work with companies that already serve millions of customers. Tech platforms, retailers, health systems, payers, and manufacturers all bring something different. There’s a lot more we can do together than any of us could do on our own. With Walmart, we get to work with a retailer and pharmacy that’s part of everyday life all across the country. This one is particularly special to me. We walked into Bentonville nine years ago hoping to build something together. It took a little longer than we expected, but here we are. Build the store. Then build more stores.

TJ Parker of @GeneralMedicine on healthcare's new bottleneck, and why getting care should be as easy as buying anything else online: "Advice is becoming really abundant, and getting to a list of answers with a GPT has become a thing that almost everyone is doing now in healthcare." "But I think that answer almost always comes back to a set of tasks for you to go do. It might be, you should go call and book an appointment with a doctor, call and book an appointment with a specialist, go get these sets of labs, or go get this imaging done." "While advice is abundant, you then are immediately stuck back with the realities of the current healthcare system." "We've for a very long time felt like the best modality for that is a store. Everything else in your life, you search and browse the options available to you, you understand what they cost, you understand when they're available, and you go buy the thing." "The time is right for something like this in healthcare because the bottleneck is no longer advice, the bottleneck is taking action on that advice." @tjparker Full conversation: youtube.com/watch?v=HBlJ7xh-…

The most mature statement ever made about owning up to past mistakes is from Violent J of the Insane Clown Posse.

Make a 20-track comp of your all-time fav tracks, each artist can only feature once. Not the 'best' songs, the ones that bring instant joy the second you hear the first note, the ones that give other people the best insight into what stirs your soul. Share when ready. #20tracks