Walgreens’ Well Experience format: Design concepts for pharmacy’s future

Walk into many newer Walgreens stores, and you’ll see the company’s revitalized mission as an accessible community health-and-wellness provider come to life. Designed to improve patient access to pharmacists and showcase the chain’s health, wellness and daily living offerings more effectively, Walgreens’ Well Experience store format embodies the vision for a more engaged and more comprehensive model of pharmacy practice championed over the past decade by Kermit Crawford, outgoing president of pharmacy, health and wellness.

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Work on the new Well Experience store format actually began as early as 2006 and 2007, Crawford explained. The new design incorporated both the vast expertise Walgreens had forged serving patients at its pharmacies with both prescription services and disease prevention and management, and the perspective Crawford had forged as the former chief of Walgreens Health Initiatives, the company’s pharmacy benefit management division.



“My first 20 years were on the retail side, so I had a clear understanding of that [business-to-consumer] relationship,” said Crawford. “But running WHI, our PBM, I really started to understand our other key customers in the healthcare equation — our payers and providers. So it was about putting it all together. ... Within this, we started to think about the design of the future, and how we could create value for both patients and payers.”



Informing the design process: the input of health plan decision-makers and others. “We had all these different constituents, and we needed to have a value proposition for each of those,” Crawford explained. “We brought in all the key stakeholders to look at that new concept, and get their opinions. It was a very collaborative design.”



The result is a retail concept store that “emphasizes the patient-pharmacist relationship and positions Walgreens as the No. 1 destination for health and daily living,” according to the company.



Walgreens says its Well Experience stores “feature a new, enhanced layout, a number of new product selections and a completely revamped pharmacy and healthcare experience,” with a front end “focused on daily living needs that help customers live well, while the Well Experience pharmacy is designed to foster pharmacist-patient relationships to help customers get well and stay well.”



Among the innovations Crawford championed in the development of the Well Experience design are private consultation areas and pharmacist work areas in front of the pharmacy counter that “help patients feel comfortable bringing their health and medication concerns to their Walgreens pharmacist,” Walgreens said.



“As our Well Experience strategy moves pharmacists out from behind the counter to better counsel patients on the proper use of medication, and to expand our scope of services, we are enabling our healthcare professionals to provide even more advanced care through store design, automation and healthcare information technology,” said the company. “Harnessing technology tools, such as electronic medical records, shared billing and scheduling platforms and integrated data, Walgreens can provide a holistic view of each patient for health plans, physicians and other health system partners. We are meeting what has been described as healthcare’s triple aim: improving patient experience, driving better health outcomes and lowering overall healthcare costs.”