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.”
The new medical students are being trained in strategies and approaches not emphasized in traditional medical schools. These include:
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.”
Integrating high-tech tools like virtual reality, augmented reality and drone-based systems can improve 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.
Attract other healthcare systems to reimagine how doctors and health care workers are taught to achieve whole-patient care.
Both Walton and Dr. Sharmila Makhija, founding dean and chief executive officer of the medical school, 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.
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.
Read the entire August blog on David Mee-Lee's Tips n Topics here →
Authored by Dr. David Mee-Lee, “Tips & Topics” is a monthly blog covering three sections: Savvy, Skills and Soul, with additional sections varying from month to month. Topics include Stump the Shrink, Success Stories and Shameless Selling.