As the richest woman in the world, Alice Walton can afford blue chip medical care. But after a serious car accident landed her in the hospital, even her fortune couldn’t shield her from multiple infections, surgeries and persistent medical issues resulting from her injuries. The experience convinced the Walmart heir that the U.S. healthcare system is broken, and she decided to use some of her vast wealth to do something about it.
One result is a tuition-free medical school — the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine (AWSOM) — which was founded in 2021 and opened its doors this summer. AWSOM will train future doctors in a fundamentally different way. Along with foundational medical skills, the school emphasizes preventive medicine and addresses lifestyle factors that contribute to overall wellbeing.
This “whole person” approach to healthcare is reflected in the AWSOM building, which features an art gallery, roof garden and recreation areas to incorporate art, nature and wellness into the learning environment. The school is located in Bentonville, Arkansas, the Walton family’s hometown and the birthplace and headquarters of the retail behemoth that made them phenomenally wealthy. It shares a 134-acre campus with other Alice Walton-funded projects, including the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Heartland Whole Health Institute, a research, education and advocacy organization founded in 2019. The institute seeks to increase access to healthcare and make the health system more responsive to patient needs by promoting value-based care; that is, healthcare that emphasizes quality of care and centers the patient’s experience.
Alice Walton, an art collector herself, has focused her giving primarily on the arts until relatively recently, as IP’s Mike Scutari has reported, with increasing emphasis on arts education, diversity and leadership development. In Walton’s entry in this year’s Time100 Philanthropy list, Ford Foundation President Darren Walker said of her giving: “Alice Walton’s work on bridging the inequality gap in the arts in America is radical. She’s not seeking the government to underwrite anything. It’s all a private endeavor. And it reflects the needs of the people in communities.”
Time also recognized Walton for her health philanthropy, and both interests are incorporated in the new medical school building. There are live plants and multiple windows to permit plenty of natural light. The exterior was designed to mimic the state’s rugged cliffs, and is surrounded by lush landscaping and foot paths bordered by sculptures, trees and green space.
As Walton said when the school welcomed its inaugural class of 48 students in July, “AWSOM will help medical students rise to the health challenges of the 21st century through a reimagination of American medical education that incorporates physical, mental, emotional, and social wellbeing.”
How The Alice L. Walton School of Medicine works
Alice Walton learned from personal experience that the U.S. health system primarily pays or reimburses for illness — rather than doing what it can to prevent it in the first place. “She wanted to tackle what is probably one of the most difficult things to tackle in healthcare: changing that paradigm,” said Sharmila Makhija, AWSOM’s CEO and founding dean. “That was what led her to create a pipeline of doctors that are learning things in a different way.”
It isn’t easy to build a medical school from the ground up, particularly one that is pioneering an alternative approach to medical training. Still, the project came together relatively quickly. Founded in 2021, the school’s development has been spearheaded since 2023 by Makhija, a gynecological oncologist. AWSOM received preliminary accreditation last fall, and the building construction was completed recently. The first class of students was celebrated with a white coat ceremony in late July.
“We were very mindful in how we designed the curriculum,” Makhija said. “Of course, students have to learn the core materials, the clinical sciences. But we wanted to very intentionally incorporate the strengths of this community. We’re sitting on the campus of a world-class museum; why not utilize that? So we have a director of arts and medicine who was hired to be that segue, to weave the art of healing through the four years of the curriculum.” (The role art can play in promoting healing is driving a growing “social prescribing” movement, as Mike Scutari reported last year.)
AWSOM students receive research experience and start clinical training after just two months with the school’s primary education partner, the Mercy health system. Students are also introduced to the whole health philosophy from the start, with an emphasis on prevention.
“When students are learning about diabetes, for example, they have to learn how to manage it, but they’re also going to learn how it develops and what you can do to prevent it,” Makhija said. “How do you incorporate wellness practices into daily life? How do you communicate with the patient to help them understand how to do that?”
She pointed to nutrition as a key factor in promoting wellness. “A recent JAMA study found that most medical schools spend very little time covering nutrition,” Makhija said. “The average amount of hours that medical students study nutrition is about 19. We provide close to 60 hours of nutrition education. In fact, we have a teaching garden that we just harvested last week.”
In creating the medical school, Walton was also animated by the healthcare shortage in rural areas of the U.S. Makhija pointed out that there are four counties in Arkansas that have no doctor at all and another eight to 10 that have just one. ”Access is a problem, and it’s access on many levels,” she said. “It’s access for patients, but also for those lone doctors; if they are the only doctor in a county, their support system is not there.” AWSOM and the Heartland Whole Health Institute are working with Mercy to increase its virtual care capacity. It is also intentionally recruiting students from rural areas in hopes that they will return to those communities to practice.
The interest is clearly there. After AWSOM received preliminary accreditation, the team had only three months to recruit students for its inaugural class; they received 2,000 applications and are already considering candidates for next year.
Tuition will be waived for the first five classes of students through their entire time at AWSOM; what will happen after that has yet to be decided. The goal is to create a model that others can replicate without counting on a billionaire for funding. “We’re in a good situation because we have Alice’s support, but we want to create a curriculum and a model that’s sustainable and that could be replicated elsewhere,” Makhija said. “Yes, we are fortunate to have her generosity, but we also are creating a very fiscally responsible modeling of how you manage this curriculum.” AWSOM has already had representatives from institutions planning medical schools reach out for information and advice.
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All in the (Walton) family
There is, of course, a lot to dislike about an economic system that allows for an enormous (and growing) concentration of wealth in the hands of a select few — in this case, in the coffers of a single family. The Waltons are famous as the richest family in the U.S. with a staggering combined fortune of over $400 billion.
The dollars just continue to multiply: Early this week, the family’s net worth shot up by $28 billion, according to 24/7 Wall Street. As the family’s wealth has increased, there’s also been a steady stream of criticisms of the retail giant that fuels their fortune — from its low wages and stingy benefits to the impoverishment of the communities where it operates. And even though Alice Walton has given away an estimated $1.5 billion during her lifetime, that impressive figure still amounts to a fraction of her head-spinning wealth, as The Conversation pointed out last year.
Changes in tax policy, campaign spending limits, stronger labor laws and other reforms would go a long way toward creating a more equitable system, but this seems unlikely to happen any time soon — certainly not under the Trump administration.
In the meantime, it’s good to see billionaires giving at least some of their dollars to worthy causes. Through the Walton Family Foundation and numerous other giving vehicles associated with specific Waltons and branches of the family, the clan is doing just that — from supporting efforts to mitigate climate change and funding vaccine research to addressing the doctor shortage and working to repair our struggling healthcare system, as Alice Walton aims to do.
