May 18, 2012
National pharmacy giant CVS Caremark is expanding its Hawaii presence next year — armed with plans to build four new MinuteClinics in the Islands along with a new deal with the state’s largest commercial health insurer.
Exactly where and when those four new MinuteClinics — CVS Caremark’s line of retail-based health-care clinics — will open have yet to be determined.
Source: Pacific Business News
Take Care Health Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Walgreens, and the nation’s largest and most comprehensive manager of convenient care clinics and worksite health and wellness centers, is now providing the Welcome to Medicare Preventive Visit and Medicare Yearly Wellness Visits at all Take Care Clinic locations throughout the country. The Welcome to Medicare Preventive Visit and Medicare Yearly Wellness Visits are wellness services for Medicare enrollees which include screenings for a number of common conditions as well as education and counseling to encourage wellness and prevent disease.
Source: MarketWatch
MinuteClinic is helping patients with diabetes stay on top of their condition this spring by offering a free monitoring visit. This service helps patients with diabetes keep their health in check between visits to a primary care provider, and is available seven days a week at the walk-in medical clinics inside select CVS/pharmacy stores across the United States.
Read the entire press release here.
Over the past decade, clinics located in national pharmacy chains or big-box retail stores have opened in many communities around the nation. This has been controversial in the family medicine community; many family physicians argue that such clinics are reasonable, cost-effective alternatives to emergency department visits, and others insist that they interfere with continuity practices and fragment care. Are retail clinics a disruptive innovation that improves access to care, or are they a symptom of weak primary care standards?
As of April 1, the following retail clinic operators were the largest in the country with the specified number of clinics.
MinuteClinic — 541
TakeCare — 358
The Little Clinic — 80
Target Clinic — 44
FastCare — 37
RediClinic — 29
Baptist Express Care at Walmart — 18
DR Walk-In Medical Clinics — 13
Cigna Care Today — 11
Aurora QuickCare — 10
Lindora Health Clinics — 9
Alegent Quick Care — 6
Avanti Medical Group — 6
Cox Health at Walmart — 5
Geisinger CareWorks — 5
Heritage Valley Health at Walmart — 5
Southwest Medical at Walmart — 5
Source: Becker’s ASC Review
Walgreens presented new data last week at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2012 National Immunization Conference, providing evidence of the company’s leadership in expanding access to immunizations and support of disease prevention in the United States. The studies demonstrate the impact of three Walgreens initiatives aimed at increasing immunization rates: off-clinic hour vaccine administration, a pharmacist-led meningitis vaccination program and expansion of access to immunization services in underserved areas.
Source: MarketWatch
The model of the typical doctor’s office visit has changed drastically over the years. Walk-in medical clinics (also often called “retail clinics”) began as a sort of experiment in healthcare in early 2000, and now number over 1,200 nationwide in retailers like Walgreens, CVS and Walmart. However, are the services offered at these convenience clinics always more affordable?
Source: SFGate
At Feb. 29, Walgreens operated 8,290 locations in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Guam. The company has 7,841 drugstores nationwide, 151 more than a year ago. Walgreens also operates worksite health and wellness centers, infusion and respiratory services facilities, specialty pharmacies and mail service facilities. Its Take Care Health Systems subsidiary manages more than 700 in-store convenient care clinics and worksite health and wellness centers.
Source: MarketWatch
As the Trucking industry’s authority on Health and Wellness, the Healthy Trucking Association of America (HTAA) announced today that it has pioneered another breakthrough in its efforts to improve the health and wellness of our nation’s professional drivers. The HTAA Driver Vitality Program is the first universal personal health and wellness management tool that ALL drivers can use to improve and maintain their health.
“The HTAA Driver Vitality Program is the single most important development to date in the nationwide campaign to help drivers improve their health,” says Bill Gordon, HTAA Executive Director. “It’s exactly what the industry needs – a universal platform that all drivers can use – an industry standard that can benefit every driver and every fleet.”
The HTAA has partnered with one of the world’s most successful corporate wellness companies, The Vitality Group, to develop this program for the trucking industry. The incorporation of The Vitality Group’s proven wellness solution makes the HTAA Driver Vitality Program the only health and wellness program designed for the trucking industry that has a wellness solution that has been actuarially proven to work on large groups of employees over long periods of time. The HTAA Driver Vitality Program addresses all the ailments that affect the trucking industry. Whether a driver is suffering from obesity, diabetes, respiratory illnesses, hypertension or a variety of other illnesses, the HTAA Vitality Program will identify the problem(s) that need(s) to be addressed, lay out a pathway for the driver to follow, provide the resources the driver needs, and then reward the driver for his or her efforts.
“We’ve been working for over three years to develop this program, says Gordon. So many ‘wellness programs’ are really just weight loss diet plans – there are thousands of them, and while they certainly have their place, very few continue to work in the long run and none of them addresses all the other important health issues that are plaguing the professional driver population. This is where the HTAA Driver Vitality Program stands alone – there is simply nothing else like it – This program is the game changer that is going to finally give drivers and fleets the tools they need to turn around the trucking industry’s current negative health trend. Trucking fleets and organizations ask us all the time what they can do to improve their drivers’ health. Now there is a simple answer: The very best thing we can do at this time to improve the health and wellness of drivers and the entire trucking industry is to get every single truck driver in America to start utilizing the benefits of the Driver Vitality Program as soon as possible”
The HTAA will be unveiling the details of the new HTAA Driver Vitality Program at the upcoming HTAA Healthy Trucking Summit (Atlanta, Georgia – April 24-26, 2012), the trucking industry’s most important annual health and wellness event and the number one source of education and resources aimed at improving the health of our nation’s professional driver population. Each year the HTAA invites trucking industry leaders, including Safety Directors, Human Resources Directors, Recruitment & Retention Managers, other trucking fleet and organization executives, and all stakeholders with an interest in improved driver health to attend the Summit to network and receive information and resources to help drivers get healthy and live longer lives. This year will be even more important, because trucking fleet representatives will leave the Summit armed with the most potent weapon the trucking industry has ever had for combating the lack of good health that has predominated the driver population for so many years.
Source: Press Release
A recent study by Rand Corp. published in the American Journal of Managed Care indicates that use of retail clinics is on the rise in America, mostly among busy adults with commercial insurance and median incomes of $59,000. They like the convenience of retail, though they get the ancillary benefit of costs that are “30-40 percent less expensive than similar care provided at a physician’s office, and 80 percent less expensive than care provided in the ER” for simple, acute conditions.
“The thing that really sets us apart … is really just the convenience factor, the affordability factor for patients,” DiCarlo says, acknowledging that it’s not about convenience for some. “…this is a great alternative for them. It’s a real, viable opportunity for them to seek care for things that they would, perhaps, unfortunately let go to the wayside.”
Source: Las Vegas Weekly
The researchers studied the medical care choices between 2007 and 2009 of more than 13 million Aetna insureds, in 22 markets in which there were retail clinics. Of the enrollees who were studied, 3.8 million made at least one visit to a retail clinic between 2007 and 2009. The utilization rate during the two-year period rose to a monthly rate of 6.5 visits per 1,000 enrollees in December 2009 from 0.6 visits per 1,000 enrollees in January 2007.
The study also identified the predictors of retail clinic usage. These included gender (women were more likely to use the clinics than men); distance (close proximity to the home or work of the enrollee); age (18 to 44 years old); level of health (the patients typically did not have chronic illnesses); and income (those with ZIP codes with median incomes of more than $59,000).
Source: Martindale.com
“There has been a rapid rise in the number of retail clinics across the United States, but this growth is not evenly distributed across communities,” says Craig E. Pollack, MD, MHS, an internist and Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Penn. He added that “poorer neighborhoods are less likely to have access to these clinics.”
“We know that people living in poorer areas are less likely to have health insurance, less likely to have a regular source of medical care, and may have transportation problems that keep them from getting to the doctor,” Dr. Pollack said. “By tending to locate in richer neighborhoods, retail clinics may not be meeting their full potential to help address these problems.”
Source: RetailWire
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