The World’s Richest Woman Has Opened a Medical School

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On July 14, 48 students walked through the doors of the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine in Bentonville, Ark. to become its inaugural class. Some came from neighboring cities, others from urban centers in Michigan and New York. Almost all had a choice in where they could become doctors but took a chance on the new school because of its unique approach to rethinking medical education.

Named after its founder—the world’s richest woman and an heir to the Walmart fortune—the school will train students over the next four years in a radically way from the method most traditional medical schools use. And that’s the point. Instead of drilling young physicians to chase symptom after symptom and perform test after test, 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, which involve 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 wellbeing.

Those aren’t new ideas, of course, but traditional medicine has only paid lip service to them. Experts have noted that 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. “I applied to 34 schools, and nowhere else are they doing this,” says Ellie Andrew-Vaughn, who arrived in Bentonville from Ann Arbor, Mich.

“I heard whispers about the school back in December 2021,” says Rebecca Wilson, who grew up in nearby Cave Springs and plans to remain in Arkansas to improve the health care there. “Hearing how revolutionary their outlook on medicine was, and how it was a part of the DNA and not something adapted to the curriculum like some of the other schools—that was unique.”

Visually, the school lives up to its acronym: AWSOM. The building, with soaring glass walls, is located on Walton family property and includes not just a wellness studio and gym, but a rooftop park, healing gardens where students can study, growing gardens for producing healthy foods, and a reflection pond. A path from the rooftop park leads through the Ozark forest directly to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which Walton built in 2011, as a reminder to the students about the link between healing, art, science, and humanity.

Walton is covering tuition for the first five graduating classes. For her investment, 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.

Creating a new medical school in 2025 isn’t an easy or obvious project, especially when the mission is to redesign medical education. “My brother Jim said, ‘Oh, that’s a big undertaking, Alice.’ I think my big brother was trying to protect me from myself,” she says with a smile.

But 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.

A broken system

Medicine in the U.S. has long incentivized doctors to respond to people’s symptoms—by ordering many rounds of tests and procedures, to name 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, and patients are saddled with exorbitant fees that haven’t always contributed to better health outcomes. The system also 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.

Where do you start if you want to recreate health care from scratch? There isn’t a single solution, and any strategy needs to account for not just how doctors are trained and practice medicine, but also the financial incentives that currently drive those practices. In 2019, Walton founded the Heartland Whole Health Institute, located steps from the new medical school, which focuses on research, health advocacy, and education about the policies and financial systems necessary to advance preventive care. With AWSOM, she is turning her attention to finding a better way to train the people who will populate that system: future doctors.

“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.”

That includes integrating emerging technologies like AI and digital health innovations that can help people track and manage health conditions like diabetes, obesity, and blood pressure. “We are in a huge transition point right now in terms of technology,” she says. “I’m really excited about the potential.”

An art-infused curriculum

Her vision for an innovative curriculum at the medical school began taking shape after a meeting with Dr. Lloyd Minor, dean of the Stanford School of Medicine and a fellow Arkansan, who became AWSOM’s chair of the board of directors. (AWSOM also has a formal collaboration with Stanford, in which half a dozen of the university’s faculty will teach incoming students and mentor both students and faculty.)

To helm the school, Walton chose Dr. Sharmila Makhija, a gynecologic cancer surgeon from Alabama who shared Walton’s commitment to whole-health principles and improving the quality of health care in the South.

“The foundation [of the curriculum] is traditional medicine but enhanced with the humanities and the arts to improve the delivery of care—so we improve on how we [act] with patients and how we partner with patients,” says Makhija.

Walton’s personal passion for art informed and infused the new school’s humanities-based approach. Introduced to watercolors by her mother, she made her first art purchase—a print of Picasso’s Blue Nude—as a child from her father’s Walton’s 5 & 10 in Bentonville. As an adult, she collected key pieces of American art spanning five centuries, then founded the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville to share what is now a collection of more than 3,500 pieces with the community, for free. “Art was a foreign thing here,” she says. “Museums weren’t a part of our life.” But when the museum opened in 2011, it resonated, becoming a center for social events.

Crystal Bridges and AWSOM are physically attached for a reason. An integral part of the medical school curriculum involves exposure to and appreciation for the lessons that healers can learn from art. “In the time I was going in and out of hospitals, I had to grab whatever I could find to keep my sanity,” Walton says 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. “It sounds basic, but you start to talk about, ‘What did it feel like to observe someone closely, or how did it feel to be seen?’” says Makhija. “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.”

On a wintry January day, Walton walks through the museum’s installation and stops at one of her favorites: a gigantic depiction of the opening words of the U.S. Constitution, ”We the People.” The original calligraphy is recreated with thousands of shoelaces in different colors and fabrics.

On the opposite wall, Walton chose to place an array of portraits of “who we are as people,” she says, ranging from one of George Washington painted by Charles Willson Peale in the early 1780s to a digital installation featuring a fracking worker from North Dakota—“two of my boyfriends George and Johnny,” as Walton describes them. The series also includes the first known portrait of an American, painted in Colonial times, and a portrait of a Black woman painted after the Ferguson riots. “We don’t only go by time periods,” she says of the way the pieces in the museum are displayed. “Some of the fun is putting George and Johnny together.”

The installation spans pieces from all time periods, all races, and all walks of life—a theme she infuses in the medical school as well. “Health care is the most inequitable,” she 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.”

Walton believes that every piece should be displayed and enjoyed by the public, not tucked away in storage. So in 2017, she created the Art Bridges program, a collaboration with more than 250 smaller museums around the country that essentially extends the available wall space for pieces by rotating works constantly.

That same 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 Makhija. “Wherever they go to work, they’ve got to understand who they are serving.”

Doctors of the future

About 2,000 students applied to the school’s 48 spots, and many who were chosen share an interest in bringing health care to underserved regions, particularly Arkansas. One is Emily Bunch, who grew up in Little Rock and was drawn to the school’s focus on nutrition education, which traditional medical schools tend to gloss over. While 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. AWSOM’s 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,” Bunch 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.”

“It’s a big problem in Arkansas and a big part of the reason I wanted to become a doctor—to serve as a guide for other people,” Bunch says. “Arkansas desperately needs more whole-health and preventive care.”

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.

Safwan Sarker, from Brooklyn, is eager to find ways to improve home-based care by integrating high-tech tools like virtual reality and augmented reality for underserved populations. “There aren’t enough people researching these [strategies],” he says. “So people dismiss them. But AWSOM is encouraging us to 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 we get the evidence-based framework for these novel methods, they could lead the way in terms of bridging gaps.”

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.

There are signs this approach has appeal beyond the heartland. 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. Walton is delighted to watch the future of health care take root in the places where she played as a child, especially since the area desperately needs better health solutions. “It’s going to be really exciting and fun to see what happens,” she says.

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