Walgreens' (WBA) Research Website To Add Value In Healthcare

World’s first pharmacy-led, health and wellbeing enterprise Walgreens Boots Alliance (NASDAQ:WBA) has recently come up with the Center for Health & Wellbeing Research to put its progressive foot forward in achieving a strategic goal of value creation in healthcare. Per the company, this is a website containing more than 50 Walgreens outcomes studies, completed over the past six years.

The research areas of Center for Health & Wellbeing Research provide access to care and patient experience, adherence and clinical outcomes, digital health and member engagement, health care costs, HIV and specialty pharmacy, vaccinations among others. With twin target, this new online institution intends to help improve patient care and outcomes through scientific research at reasonable health care costs.

The Walgreens Center for Health & Wellbeing Research team comprises more than 25 Walgreens health services researchers, clinicians, statisticians, public health practitioners, actuaries and data scientists. Notably, there are also quite a few scientific research partners of Walgreens, all dedicated to enhance healthcare values. These academic institutes are Johns Hopkins Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health besides the Scripps Translational Science Institute, the University of California, San Francisco - School of Pharmacy and the University of Chicago Medicine.

Several research studies have already been published by the entire team. One such study is on pharmacy patients enrolled in Medicare Prescription Drug Plans. Per the company, the study found that “patients who were late to refill prescriptions and who received reminder calls from local Walgreens pharmacists demonstrated nearly 23% greater adherence within the first 14 days of the expected refill date.”

In this context, let us brief a few lines on the company’s earlier-announced strategic goals that aimed to maximize its scope and scale over time. The plan reflects significant value-creating opportunities for the company to drive a long-term shareholder value. It also focuses on improving core performance in the near term.

Price Performance

In the past month, Walgreens has been seen to outperform the industry with respect to share price movement. The stock has gained 3.2%, ahead of the industry’s 1.7% rise during the period.

Zacks Rank & Key Picks

Walgreens currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). A few better-ranked medical stocks are Edwards Lifesciences Corp. (NYSE:EW) , Lantheus Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:LNTH) and Align Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALGN) . Edwards Lifesciences and Align Technology sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), while Lantheus Holdings carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Edwards Lifesciences has a long-term expected earnings growth rate of 15.2%. The stock has gained around 3.2% over the last three months.

Lantheus Holdings has a long-term expected earnings growth rate of 12.5%. The stock has surged 66.1% over the last six months.

Align Technology has a long-term expected earnings growth rate of 26.6%. The stock has rallied roughly 29.6% over the last three months.

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