WebMD Health and Walgreens partnership underscores retail pharmacy as healthcare information depot
Two iconic health brands were brought together last week with the partnership between WebMD Health and Walgreens. The deal couples the online go-to source for healthcare information with one of the retail pharmacy leaders in advancing the scope of practice across the back bench. The deal also underscores the industry trend toward making healthcare coaching readily available at the pharmacy counter by combining WebMD's digital engagement tools with on-hand assistance from Walgreens' pharmacists and nurse practitioners.
The offering is reminiscent of Rite Aid's Health Alliance program, where specially trained health coaches are on hand to assist patients with chronic and polychronic conditions. (Rite Aid most recently signed a sixth partnership under its Health Alliance umbrella with Physician Direct ACO of Detroit.)
In announcing its year-end performance last week, Walgreens identified patients with chronic conditions and the consumerization of health care as two key tailwinds that will help drive retail performance through next year. Creating a healthcare information platform that Walgreens' patients are incentivized to engage will help capitalize on both of those trends. "With our suite of healthcare services and team of professionals in our communities, with our approach to omnichannel access and the strength of our loyalty program ... we are positioned well to serve the needs of a changing customer and industry," Greg Wasson, Walgreens president and CEO told analysts.
The respective audience Walgreens and WebMD brings to the other is quite significant. Walgreens just closed a year in which its retail pharmacy market share grew 30 basis points to 19% and in which the company filled a record 856 million prescriptions.
And according to WebMD CEO David Schlanger, traffic to the WebMD Health Network reached an average of 179.4 million unique users per month, generating 3.5 billion pages for the company's second quarter and increases of 43% and 31% respectively from the prior year. "To put the scale of our online audience into perspective, according to the most recent comScore report, WebMD Health Network is No. 27 of the Top 100 Web properties across all categories and verticals. Within the health information category in the second quarter, WebMD continues to lead the category with total U.S. monthly visitors across both mobile and desktop on a de-duplicated basis [with] approximately 63 million [and] the WebMD Health Network is No. 1 in the health information category for U.S. PC reach, No. 1 among U.S. mobile health destination and No. 1 in every one of the 50 largest condition suffering population online," he said. "In any given month, approximately 40% to 50% of all consumers coming to WebMD are engaging in our wellness and lifestyle content in areas which including eating well, healthy beauty, pregnancy and parenting."
And just as Walgreens is an omnichannel destination that engages its customers on the platform of their choosing, WebMD is readily accessed from a multitude of devices. During the second quarter approximately 29% of the company's page view traffic was from desktop, 36% was from a smartphone and 8% was from a tablet device. The remaining 27% was international traffic.