Under Walmart’s new partnership with DirectHealth.com, about half of 4,300 Walmart’s stores will feature DirectHealth.com licensed agents,

who will help consumers shop for health insurance and navigate Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges.

OCTOBER 18, 2014 – Walmart doesn’t settle for second place: The nation’s #1 retailer just said it wants to be the #1 health care provider in the retail industry, too.

The company’s statement came on Monday, alongside an announcement about Walmart’s new health insurance initiative.

Under Walmart’s new partnership with DirectHealth.com, about half of 4,300 Walmart’s stores will feature DirectHealth.com licensed agents, who will help consumers shop for health insurance and navigate Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges.

The program, known as Healthcare Begins Here, begins on Friday Oct. 10 and will run for two months. Not coincidentally, the Medicare open enrollment period begins next week, and the open enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges begins in November.

“This approach is similar to what we saw with Walmart’s retail clinic strategy, where they leased space in their stores to local health systems rather than operating their own clinics,” my colleague Alicia Daugherty told me. (Daugherty leads theAdvisory Board Company’s marketing and planning research.)

“That strategy allowed Walmart to test market receptivity to retail care and observe patient traffic patterns and clinic operations,” Daugherty points out, before launching their own primary care clinics this summer.

And partnering with DirectHealth.com for two months offers another benefit, Daugherty noted. “It also helps Walmart study how consumers shop for health plans – useful if they [end up] rolling out their own health plan,” she concluded.