Welcome to the August edition of Tips and Topics.
In SAVVY, Alice Walton, the world’s richest woman opened a medical school in Bentonville, Arkansas. At the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine (AWSOM), “they will get all the science and disease knowledge they need to manage the ‘sick-care’ side of things,” Walton says. But “I wanted to create a school that really gives doctors the ability to focus on how to keep their patients healthy.”
In SKILLS, the new medical students are being trained in skills not emphasized in traditional medical schools. Besides learning the SKILLS of traditional medicine, they will have nutrition-related training and opportunities to integrate high-tech tools to improve home-based care and address health care gaps.
In SOUL, changing values, beliefs and behaviors on an individual level is hard enough. But doing that at a systems level is even more difficult. Add in financial incentives to keep the current system cemented in and it almost seems like an impossible dream. Bright-eyed, enthusiastic, new medical students have their chance at “changing the world” and Alice Walton is kick-starting the process.
On July 14, 2025, Alice Walton, the world’s richest woman and an heir to the Walmart fortune, opened a medical school in Bentonville, Arkansas. Time magazine reports: “The school will train students over the next four years in a radically different way from the method most traditional medical schools use… Walton anticipates that some of the newly minted doctors will bring what they learn to the local community—specifically to underserved areas in Arkansas, Walton's home state. But her grander vision is for the model she creates to be mirrored at other medical schools across the country—so that what started in northwest Arkansas can spread to other regions with few health resources.”
I have excerpted from the original TIME Magazine article and formatted the information in Tips and Topics style.
Tip 1
Traditional medicine pays only lip-service to preventive medicine and whole-health principles.
With a mission is to redesign medical education, Alice Walton “wants her school’s graduates to keep patients healthy by practicing something that most doctors today don’t prioritize - preventive medicine and whole-health principles”:
Caring for (and not just treating) the entire person and all of the factors—from their mental health to their living conditions and lifestyle choices—that contribute to well-being.
While as much as 80% of medical education focuses on biology, about 60% of premature deaths are due to behavioral factors including lifestyle habits like diet, exercise, and smoking.
Traditional medicine teaches young physicians to chase symptom after symptom and perform test after test, instead of balancing this with a focus also on prevention and other factors important for well-being.
“They will get all the science and disease knowledge they need to manage the ‘sick-care’ side of things,” Walton says. But “I wanted to create a school that really gives doctors the ability to focus on how to keep their patients healthy.”
Tip 2
USA Medicine incentivizes a focus on people’s symptoms, tests and procedures, which is costly for people’s finances and health.
“Walton’s firsthand experience as a patient set her on this path. After a serious car accident in the 1980s, she battled a bone infection, multiple surgeries, and lingering health issues for more than a decade. Walton grew convinced that “our health care system is broken” and that someone needed to catalyze change.”
Medicine in the U.S. has long incentivized doctors to respond to people’s symptoms:
By ordering many rounds of tests and procedures - two cost-driving examples - rather than trying to prevent them in the first place.
The doctor-patient conversations that should be at the heart of effective medical care are rare today.
Patients are saddled with exorbitant fees that haven’t always contributed to better health outcomes.
The current medical system:
Contributes to care deserts in rural America. Arkansas, in particular, ranks 48th out of the 50 states in the share of adults in fair or poor health.
The state also has the highest maternal death and teen birth rates in the U.S.
Needs to account for not just how doctors are trained and practice medicine, but also the financial incentives that currently drive those practices.
Needs more research, health advocacy, and education about the policies and financial systems necessary to advance preventive care.
“Health care is the most inequitable,” Walton says. “A lot of that is because we don’t have doctors and health-care providers who look like a lot of people. It is a big issue, and it is a huge piece of the problem in why people don’t get health care.”
Tip 3
Traditional medicine enhanced with humanities and the arts improves the delivery of care on how we act and partner with patients.
Walton wants to remind the students about the link between healing, art, science, and humanity. The foundation of the medical school curriculum is traditional medicine.
But it will be enhanced with the humanities and the arts to improve the delivery of care with implications for how doctors act with their patients and how they partner with them.
An integral part involves exposure to and appreciation for the lessons that healers can learn from art.
Walton talks of how painting watercolors and reading art books helped in her recovery. “I do believe the art world and the health care world need to collide more, and both will benefit from it.”
All students will take a course, for example, that involves drawing one another and studying pieces in the museum. The hope is to sharpen their skills of observation and empathy.
“What did it feel like to observe someone closely, or how did it feel to be seen?’” “It’s not a usual way in the medical world to think and talk, so it’s a different language, but that’s part of the goal: to help them understand different modes of speaking, understanding, and relating to others.”
A focus on putting the community first infuses the training that the new medical students receive so that they never lose sight of why they became physicians: to serve the patients that need them the most.
To reiterate their broader role in society as healers, all of the new students started community service work on their third day on campus.
“We expect the students, the faculty, everybody to be of service to the community,” says Dr. Sharmila Makhija, founding dean and chief executive officer of the medical school. “Wherever they go to work, they’ve got to understand who they are serving.”
The new medical students are being trained in skills not emphasized in traditional medical schools.
Tip 1
Nutrition-related training, including culinary classes, can counter the allure of processed and fast food and address struggles with weight.
The medical school accreditation organization recommends that curriculums devote at least 25 hours of instruction to nutrition. Most schools average about 20 hours, in some cases only as electives.
The Alice L. Walton School of Medicine (AWSOM) curriculum currently includes more than 50 hours of nutrition-related training, including culinary classes.
Doctors-to-be will spend class time gardening and at a teaching farm, learning about the seasonality of fresh foods and how to cook them—then passing those lessons onto patients.
“There is a lack of understanding of nutrition and so much exposure to fast food,” Emily Bunch, medical student, says of her own struggles with weight and finding healthy food options growing up. “It wasn’t until a doctor talked to me about nutrition in a whole-health way that I understood the mental and psychological aspects of weight, and that empowered me to finally take control of my health.”
Tip 2
Integrating high-tech tools like virtual reality, augmented reality and drone-based systems can improve home-based care and health care gaps.
“As part of their training, students will also have the opportunity to design parts of their curriculum through research projects and community service. The hope is that these will lead to novel ways of delivering care and improving health outcomes, especially for communities that current health care services don’t reach.”
Research ways to improve home-based care by integrating high-tech tools like virtual reality and augmented reality for underserved populations.
Look at new systems and new ways to help populations like those in rural communities. If they aren’t getting their medications on time, would a drone-based system work?
Once there are evidence-based frameworks for these novel methods, they could lead the way in terms of bridging gaps.
Integrating emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital health innovations that can help people track and manage health conditions like diabetes, obesity, and blood pressure.
Tip 3
Attract medical schools and other healthcare systems to reimagine how doctors and health care workers are taught to achieve whole-patient care.
Both Walton and Makhija know their graduates will face challenges in bringing what they learn in the classroom to the real world. “We can have whatever curriculum we want, but if they are thrown out in an environment where they are not practicing whole health, then it’s for naught,” says Walton. The new graduates must be part of the solution to change that, she believes.
AWSOM partnered with the local health system, Mercy, which will not only provide clinical exposure to the doctors-in-training but also implement some of the whole-patient approaches the school is hoping to introduce, including initially with a cardiac care center.
Already, Makhija says a few health systems have contacted her about AWSOM’s whole-health focus, and Walton hopes the school will serve as a model of a new type of medical education.
“It’s all about rethinking and re-envisioning what the education of the next generation of health care workers will be like,” says Makhija. “Alice and I are very keen on creating a sustainable model of education, both in how we deliver the curriculum that can be replicated, as well as fiscally, so that other schools can use a similar model.”
If successful, AWSOM could prove that medical school should, and can, be about more than just biology and anatomy. It can also be about what drives a person, and what feeds them—literally, figuratively, spiritually.
Changing values, beliefs and behaviors on an individual level is hard enough. But doing that at a systems level is even more difficult. Add in financial incentives to keep the current system cemented in and it almost seems like an impossible dream.
Alice Walton is tilting at that windmill of change in traditional medical education and the healthcare industry. Good for her.
In my 35 years of focused training and consulting on addiction treatment systems, I maybe moved the needle a few degrees from program-driven, fixed length-of-stay thinking to person-centered, outcomes-driven systems of care. But that is arguable if you survey the general public who still thinks addiction treatment is sending someone “off to rehab” to complete and graduate from a program. Even clients and patients still get that message from some addiction counselors.
So in my ripe old career age, I murmur to myself the Serenity Prayer. I am done “saving the world,” but these bright-eyed, enthusiastic, new medical students have their chance at “changing the world” and Alice Walton is kick-starting the process.
As they say in my homeland Australia....Goodonya, mate!
Thank you for joining us this month. See you in September.
David