February 23, 2012

Retail clinics expanding services more than locations

October 12, 2009 By 1 Comment

Retail clinic operators want potential patients to know that they do more than treat the common cold and administer flu shots.

In recent months clinics have announced the addition of several new services, such as asthma and diabetes management; more vaccines, including for HPV and shingles; school and sport physicals; diagnoses and treatment of conjunctivitis; and treatment of various skin disorders.

Clinics contend the added services are the result of customer demand. But critics counter that it’s another effort to pull patients away from primary care offices and improve clinics’ bottom lines. At the very least, critics say, it’s an attempt to attract business during the slower times after flu season.

Tom Charland, president and CEO of Merchant Medicine, a Shoreview, Minn.-based retail clinic consultancy firm, said he has seen plenty of media coverage about the expanded services. “But I don’t really see anything new.” Clinics might be adding new vaccines to the offering, but that’s really no different than administering flu shots, which retail clinics have done since their inception, he said. And services such as cholesterol checks, skin checks and school physicals have always been offered, and are things nurse practitioners are capable of and well-trained to do, Charland said.

Charland thinks part of the renewed interest in nontraditional services is the result of the clinics’ struggles to stay afloat over the past few years, especially during the non-flu season.

Troyen A. Brennan, MD, executive vice president and chief medical officer for CVS Caremark, which owns and operates MinuteClinic, said it’s true clinics in select markets have struggled as a result of oversaturation in areas where the demand wasn’t enough to sustain them year-round. The chain shut 89 of its 545 locations for the summer and are now re-opening them for flu season.

But the addition of services isn’t about a need to stay busy or improve the bottom line, Dr. Brennan said. The growth of the company has been “stunning” — a year-over-year growth of more than 25% in volume — based on what it’s been doing all along, he said.

People have been asking for these additional services for some time, and the clinics are delivering, Dr. Brennan said. Many services, such as school sport physicals, have been offered before, but were recently added to the clinic’s electronic medical record system. The exams and treatments are being offered as evidenced-based and are more comprehensive since their inclusion in the EMR, he said.

Tine Hansen-Turton, executive director of the Convenient Care Assn., said patients see how convenient and low-cost the clinics are and look to them to meet additional needs because of a lack of access to primary care physicians.

A recent RAND study found quality of service in the clinics is similar to that of a physician practice, but costs 30% to 40% less.

But Ted Epperly, MD, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, is concerned that study might be misleading to patients who seek care at the clinics.

The study looked only at three common complaints — sore throat, urinary tract infection and earache. Yet the study might give people the false impression that it is safe to visit the clinics for things outside of “three often simple diagnoses,” Dr. Epperly said in a statement.

The American Medical Association supports retail clinics only for their use in treating episodic care. However, “the expansion of medical services from these locations is concerning and may have unintended consequences for patients,” said Rebecca Patchin, MD, chair of the AMA Board of Trustees.

Dr. Patchin said patients who receive care at the clinics should have an established relationship with a physician. The clinics also should have a referral process in place either to direct patients back to their primary care physicians for follow-up or for additional care outside the scope of the clinic’s practice, she said.

“Although nurse practitioners and retail health clinics can provide an access point into the funnel of complex health care, they are not the end point of that funnel. In fact they only contribute to the fragmentation to care, not to the integration and coordination of care that happens at primary care physician practices,” said Dr. Epperly.

But retail clinics said they are not trying to compete with primary care offices. In fact, they want to be partners with them, said Hansen-Turton. Clinic chains have been seeking partnerships with existing medical facilities in recent years in order to provide an integrated system with many access points to care.

With integrated systems, retail clinics can help primary care physicians, clinic proponents claim. They can pull out patients who can be treated by nurse practitioners, making room in the schedule for sicker patients who need a doctor.

Dr. Epperly said there have been examples of this working well, such as MinuteClinic’s partnership with The Cleveland Clinic. The problem, he said, is that partnerships like that don’t exist in rural America. The RAND study noted that 88.4% of clinics are in urban areas, with just 10.6% of the U.S. population living within a five-minute drive of a clinic, and 28.7% living 10 minutes away. “I don’t see [retail clinics] knocking on those doors. And that, quite frankly, bothers me,” Dr. Epperly said.

Dr. Brennan said MinuteClinic has ongoing efforts to not only create more partnerships with the existing health care facilities, but to strengthen those partnerships by providing more services in order to alleviate the burden on the primary care physicians.

Source: American Medical News

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Sore Throat on Aisle 4: Retail Clinics Match Quality of Doctor’s Office

September 2, 2009 By 3 Comments

The next time you go to the drugstore to pick up shampoo or paper towels, you might get that cough checked out, too.

More than a quarter of the U.S. population lives within a 10-minute drive from a retail walk-in medical clinic (or convenient care clinic) that can provide appointment-free screenings and examinations of minor afflictions right inside the store.

Staffed mostly by nurse practitioners, these clinics offer lower costs and longer hours than a standard physician’s office. But how does the quality of treatment at these convenient alternatives compare? Pretty well, according to a pair of studies published online yesterday in Annals of Internal Medicine.

“Retail clinics could serve a relatively large demographic,” says lead study author of one of the studies, Ateev Mehrotra, a professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and a researcher at the RAND Corp., a nonpartisan research group. “I had thought of these clinics as being a new issue, a novel way of [providing] care,” he says, but after looking into their prevalence, he found that they “could have a substantial impact on the health system.”

The first retail clinics opened nearly a decade ago, and as of August 2008, there were nearly 1,000 of these clinics around the country, which had received some three million visits. “The increasing number of patients who receive care at retail clinics has fueled concerns about increased health care costs, greater rates of misdiagnosis, overuse of antibiotics, and decreased delivery of preventative care,” the authors in one of the studies wrote.

Many of those concerns may be unfounded, according to the studies, based on patient records from a major insurer in Minnesota, where the clinics first emerged. The quality of care for treating three common acute afflictions—ear infections, sore throats and urinary tract infections—was just as good at retail clinics as at physician offices and urgent care centers, and better than emergency rooms (ERs), when checked against standard clinical treatment guidelines.

The findings about the nurse-only clinics were no surprise to Mehrotra, who cites previous studies showing no difference between care given by physicians as opposed to nurse practitioners.

Nevertheless, Rebecca Patchin, chair of the American Medical Association and an assistant professor of anesthesiology at Loma Linda University School of Medicine in California, recommends that, “store-based clinics have appropriate physician oversight on site and that patients be clearly informed of the qualifications of the person providing care.”

Depending on nurses for care, however, is one of the ways retail clinics keep costs down, which can be important for those who seek care there—often young and uninsured folks, Mehrotra says. Most of the clinics take insurance, Medicare and some Medicaid, but out-of-pocket prices are also listed on a service menu, allowing patients to evaluate the cost before treatment. Total costs for treating the three common minor afflictions noted above were on average 30 to 40 percent lower at a retail clinic than at a physician office or urgent care center and 80 percent lower than at ERs.

Sporadic treatment at retail clinics could disrupt continuity of treatment and preventative care, some medical groups worry. But, the study authors found, the number of patients who had preventative care within three months of treatment was about the same across all types of facilities (about 14 percent).

Most clinics are run by for-profit chains such as CVS pharmacies; Walgreens and Target that also have in-store pharmacies, causing Mehrotra and others to worry about medication overprescription. “We actually found, and perhaps surprisingly, retail clinics were not more likely to prescribe,” Mehrotra says.

Physician groups caution that the clinics should not become the sole locus of treatment. “Store-based health clinics can offer patients an option for episodic care, but cannot replace the patient–physician relationship,” Patchin said in a prepared statement.

How might changes in the health care system and the number of insured individuals alter the use of retail clinics? “It’s hard to know,” Mehrotra says. He points to anecdotal results from Massachusetts, where more people have gotten insurance, showing that it has become more difficult to get in to see physicians, so a retail clinic model might become increasingly popular.

“From a societal perspective, it might lead to a better allocation of health care resources if more patients with a mild illness go to a retail clinic,” the paper authors noted. The American Medical Association, for its part, has yet to issue an unqualified endorsement of retail clinics. As Patchin said in her statement, “Convenience should never compromise safety.”

Source: Scientific American

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Drive-Thru Medical: Retail Health Clinics’ Good Marks

September 1, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Doctors are having a hard go of things. Squeezed by falling reimbursements, soaring malpractice insurance and punishing patient loads, they shouldn’t have much to fear from the likes of Wal-Mart. But the fact is, the greeter in the red vest is increasingly going toe-to-toe with the doctor in the white coat — and winning — thanks to the growing phenomenon of retail health clinics.

Retail clinics — free-standing, walk-in medical providers located in drug stores, shopping malls and stores like Wal-Mart, Target and Walgreens — are rapidly becoming to the health-care industry what Fotomat was to the camera world. There are roughly 1,000 clinics now operating in the U.S., offering acute care for such routine problems as throat infections and earaches as well as providing diabetes and cholesterol screenings, routine checkups and vaccinations. The fees are low — and conspicuously posted; nearly all of the clinics treat both the insured and uninsured, and there is little or no waiting time. With 50 million Americans lacking health insurance and family budgets collapsing under the weight of medical costs, what’s not to like about the clinics?

Plenty, say physicians associations, whose members warn that clinics — which are typically staffed by nurse practitioners and are positioned in stores that also sell prescriptions — will be inclined to misdiagnose and overprescribe. Worse, they are not built to provide long-term care for chronic conditions such as hypertension, and they threaten the ideal of a lasting doctor-patient relationship, denying consumers a so-called “medical home.”

Those, at least, are the arguments, though it was impossible to know how well-founded they were — until now. In twin studies published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the Rand Corp. reports on an extensive survey of cost, quality and availability of retail health operations, and on nearly all measures, the clinics scored high.

The studies, which took months to compile, were based on the performance of the 982 retail clinics that existed in the U.S. as of August 2008 — a tenfold increase since 2006. While that proliferation is impressive, as with much else in the health-care system it doesn’t necessarily mean equal access to care. Clinics exist in only 33 states, and in those that have them, an overwhelming 88.4% are in urban areas. Just 10.6% of the U.S. population lives within a five-minute drive of a clinic, and 28.7% lives 10 minutes away. The South is better served than the Midwest and West, and all three regions are better served than the East. Just five states (Florida, California, Texas, Minnesota and Illinois) are home to 44% of all American retail health clinics.

But perhaps the more relevant question is, How good is the care at these stop-and-shop operations? To answer that, the Rand investigators focused on just one state, Minnesota, because clinics are well-established there and because one large health plan has been providing clinic coverage for its members for five years, meaning that there was a rich vein of data to mine. The investigators focused on data on 2,100 patients who had gone to a clinic for one of three common complaints: sore throat, urinary tract infection and earache. These were compared to patients who had visited doctors’ offices, urgent-care facilities and emergency rooms for the same ailments. The investigators judged quality of care by 14 different measures, including what kinds of tests were ordered, what drugs were prescribed and whether follow-up visits were scheduled.

If the results are any indication, the next time you have a routine medical need, you should probably make haste to a clinic. On a quality scale of 0% to 100%, the clinics finished first with a 63.6% while urgent-care centers and doctor’s offices followed within a couple of points. Habitually overcrowded emergency rooms came in last at a distant 55.1%. When it came to fees, the results were even more dramatic. For the various kinds of services studied, the average visit to a retail clinic cost $110, versus $156 for urgent care and $166 for a family doc. As for ERs? A cool $570. While even $110 for a clinic visit seems pricey, that is only the average for the three procedures studied. Minute Clinic, the industry leader with 514 outlets, charges just $62 for a minor illness or injury exam and $20 to $66 for a wellness or prevention visit.

Average cost per lab test in the Rand study also differed significantly depending on the provider: $15 at retail clinics, $27 at urgent-care facilities, $33 at doctors’ offices and a whopping $113 at the ER. The study did not bear out the fear that retail clinics would be inclined to overprescribe drugs, and when the clinics did write a prescription, the out-of-pocket cost was lower: $21 compared to a high of $26 for ERs.

“These findings provide more evidence that retail clinics are an innovative way of delivering health care,” says Dr. Ateev Mehrotra, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School and the lead author of the study. “Retail clinics are more convenient for patients, less costly and provide care that is of equal quality.”

Neither the clinics nor the studies are perfect, as the Rand team concedes. Even an exhaustive survey of one state is still a study of just that state. And the very accessibility of those Minnesota clinics might have encouraged more visits by mildly ill people whose complaints would have vanished on their own. Give the clinics so many easy pitches to hit and you may artificially drive up their average. Still, with local and regional hospitals such as the Cleveland Clinic increasingly working in partnership with such retail operations, more and more of these in-store outlets are likely to open. Which means more and more of us will be putting health care on the weekly shopping lists, along with the milk and bread.

Source: Time Magazine

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Retail Medical Clinics Offer Quality Care: Study

August 31, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Walk-in retail clinics staffed by nurse practitioners provide high-quality care for routine illnesses, a new study has found.

Writing in the Sept. 1 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, study author Dr. Ateev Mehrotra said that retail clinics — which are typically staffed by nurse practitioners and found in drug stores and other retail chain stores such as Target and Wal-Mart — provide a good standard of care for sore throat, ear infections and urinary tract infections. Mehrotra is an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and a policy analyst at Rand Health.

“I’m interested in how we deliver new forms of health care,” said Mehrotra, who compared data from retail clinics, doctors’ offices, urgent care centers and hospital emergency departments. “There’s been a lot of discussion about the quality and effectiveness of these clinics; I wanted to find out more. From the patients’ perspective, their appeal is twofold. They’re convenient and they provide significant cost savings.”

Retail clinics have become increasingly widespread in recent years. One such operation is CVS’s MinuteClinic, the focus of Mehrotra’s research. MinuteClinic staffers treat minor illnesses and injuries, and provide vaccinations and various health and wellness services. Customers can walk in without an appointment, and the clinics are open seven days a week. Most visits take no more than 15 minutes, and costs vary from $30 to $110, according to the MinuteClinic Web site.

According to Mehrotra, one-third of Americans live within a 10-minute drive of a retail clinic, and more than 6,000 of these clinics are expected to open across the United States within five years. Surveys of patients who received care at retails clinics have been positive, he added.

Mehrotra’s research team analyzed information contained in insurance claims of 2,100 Minnesotans between 2005 and 2006. The study authors chose the three diagnoses because they made up a combined 40 percent of the clinics’ caseload.

Using various statistical tools, the researchers found that the standards of care in retail clinics in Minnesota were consistent with accepted medical guidelines for those ailments, including the frequency and type of lab tests performed and drugs prescribed.

Treatment costs at the retail clinics were 30 percent to 40 percent lower than in physicians’ offices and urgent care centers, and 80 percent lower than in emergency rooms. The researchers did not detect any significant misdiagnoses, Mehrotra said.

“The increasing number of patients who receive care at retail clinics has fueled concerns about increased health care costs, greater rates of misdiagnosis, overuse of antibiotics, and decreased delivery of preventive care,” Mehrotra and colleagues wrote in the study. “When we compared these aspects of care in retail clinics, physician offices, urgent care centers, and emergency departments, we found little evidence to support these concerns.”

Dr. Scott D. Hayworth, chief executive officer of Mount Kisco Medical Group in New York, one of the largest medical practices in the Northeast, remains unconvinced and is no fan of the retail clinic model.

For one, physicians provide more comprehensive and expert care, and they know their patients’ medical history, he said.

“These [clinics] are clearly picking a few minor ailments, which tend to be less expensive to treat,” said Hayworth, who has about 200 physicians on staff as well as nurse practitioners and physician assistants. “When you have more serious illnesses, you need more back-up,” which drives up costs, he added.

Nurse practitioners and physician assistants (PAs) are effective in traditional medical settings, where there are always supervising doctors, Hayworth said. But in a retail clinic, there is no supervising doctor present, he said, adding, “Say a sore throat turns out to be something more serious. A PA may miss that diagnosis.”

Mehrotra acknowledged that his study had several limitations. It was based entirely on data from one state. It looked at predominantly young, female, insured patients who were relatively healthy and affluent. And it focused on only three diagnoses.

Still, Mehrotra said, his study provides evidence that retail clinics can offer a safe level of care and have a place in the health-care system.

Source: U.S. News & World Report

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Getting Well While You Shop

June 12, 2009 By Leave a Comment

If there’s one thing most patients lack, it’s patience. And who can blame them? When you’re burning up with fever or your child has an earache or that sore throat you’ve been nursing doesn’t seem to be going away, the last thing you want to hear is that your doctor’s next open appointment is a month from now.

Good thing then that there’s a supermarket or pharmacy nearby. Need to buy some shampoo or pick up a few things for dinner? Why not see the doctor — or, more accurately, the nurse practitioner or physician’s assistant — while you’re at it?

For all the complexities of the U.S. health-care crisis, most Americans experience the problem in a straightforward way: it’s just too hard to schedule face time with your family doctor, and it costs too much when you finally get in the door. Of the approximately 1 million physicians working in the U.S., just 30% provide primary care. If you do get an appointment during the week, you’ll probably have to take off time from work and carve out at least a few hours to sit in a waiting room. And if you get sick on a weekend, good luck.

That, of course, is assuming that you have a doctor in the first place, not a given in a country where up to 50 million people lack health insurance. Even for the insured, ever changing corporate health plans may mean that a physician you see one year is not available to you the next. In times of illness, more and more people just show up in emergency rooms, which increases crowding and slashes revenues as bills to the uninsured go unpaid. In the past 13 years, at least 190 ERs have responded by shutting their doors.

Enter the retail health clinic. In the past decade, more and more pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens, supermarkets such as Kroger and Publix and big-box stores like Wal-Mart have made space for clinics that treat minor ailments, administer vaccines and examine kids who need medical forms to enroll in camp. In those nine years, storefront clinics have logged at least 3.4 million visits. Today there are about 1,200 such clinics, pulling in some $550 million in annual revenue, by one estimate. Doctors, worried that the clinics will dig into their bottom line, are resisting the trend, but it’s hard to argue that the innovation wasn’t needed.

Early Detection

The cornerstone of prevention is early detection. Minor problems caught right away — from infections to mild hypertension to a suspicious lesion — may never blossom into major problems. But the inaccessibility of doctors makes early detection more difficult.

Among the new ranks of providers filling the void is the Little Clinic, a company that operates 99 in-store clinics in nine states. The Little Clinic experience is an unabashedly retail one. You can get in and out in 15 minutes during hours that extend into evenings and weekends. Prices are clearly displayed, as is the menu of ills the clinic can address, such as strep throat, sinus infections and flu. There are also preventive services like cholesterol and hypertension screening.

And the cost? For basic acute ailments, an uninsured person will spend about $60 (without tests) at a retail clinic, compared with $60 to $110 at a doctor’s office or hundreds more in an ER. And while the retail-clinic model launched on a cash-only basis, most outlets now accept insurance, used by about two-thirds of patients, according to a study by the Rand Corp. published in 2008.

There are some practical benefits to combining the place where you see your health-care provider with the place where you shop. “I can walk [patients] out of the clinic and show them a nutrition label,” says Sabrina Freeman, a nurse practitioner and manager at the Little Clinic. Everyone agrees physicians should stress prevention, but during an appointment, “you probably spent five minutes with somebody talking about those things.”

Nobody has any illusion that clinics are in the business as an act of altruism. The companies make money — money consumers might not otherwise have spent on health care. The Rand study showed that 90% of adult visits to retail clinics are for 10 common, often minor, reasons. But the same kinds of patients represent only 13% of traffic in doctors’ offices. While some are migrating from their doctors to the clinics, others would have sought no medical help and would have gotten better on their own.

Doctors have emerged as the biggest critics of the new trend. “The most profitable part of a family physician’s practice is exactly what retail health clinics are going after,” says Dr. Ted Epperly, head of the American Academy of Family Physicians. A family doctor treating the same conditions can see five patients an hour. Take away this revenue and doctors will be left with only complicated cases that yield less profit.

But there are less mercenary concerns too. In 2007, the American Medical Association called for an investigation into retail clinics, arguing that drugstores, which position clinics directly adjacent to pharmacies, have a conflict of interest. For instance, floating above the pharmacy counter at many CVS stores are cardboard bubbles reading think minuteclinic, raising the worry that the clinics have an incentive to write too many prescriptions, which will then be filled at the pharmacy. (No AMA investigation took place.)

Family doctors also argue that retail clinics undercut the concept of a “medical home,” a care provider who knows your history and can act as a director for all your medical needs. The clinics counter that with as many as 60% of their patients reporting that they don’t have a primary-care provider, there’s not much to undercut.

Nonetheless, clinics insist that they don’t want to be anyone’s medical home. They say they refer many patients — particularly people who come in too often, which may indicate a chronic illness — to doctors in the community. For uninsured patients who need more substantive treatment, a referral list includes low-cost community health centers or physicians who offer sliding-scale fees. “These clinics are a portal to the health-care-delivery system,” says CVS’s Chip Phillips, president of MinuteClinic.

That’s important. Many clinic patients come in with an acute problem and, while there, learn they have a chronic one. “We catch a lot of things in people who just don’t go to the doctor. Maybe they have high blood pressure and don’t know it,” says Anne Pohnert, a nurse practitioner and manager of MinuteClinics in Virginia. A retail clinic is not equipped to manage chronic hypertension, but spotting the problem is a first step.

Some retailers take this concept further, working with local health systems and hospitals. This eases ER crowding and helps a hospital extend its brand. The Cleveland Clinic is partnering with CVS in Ohio, and the Mayo Clinic has an outpost at a grocery store in Minnesota.

Despite the misgivings of doctors, retail clinics are changing the way family practices operate — and possibly for the better. Surveys show that many family doctors are now lengthening their hours and leaving more appointments open on a first-come, first-served basis.

In times of economic crisis, the ability of the free market to solve problems may come into question. But in one vital corner of the economy, a little creative capitalism is helping fill a gap.

Source: Time

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Quick fix for the sick

December 4, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Vickie Varela was sick for more than a week with a cough, congestion and sinus drainage. She tried over-the-counter remedies but nothing helped.

So on Monday, the Stafford County resident did what a growing number of people across the nation do when they need medical care. She went to a local drug store and saw a nurse practitioner.

“I have a Christmas party coming up Sunday and I got desperate. I wasn’t getting any better,” she said.

Varela visited the MinuteClinic tucked inside the CVS pharmacy on Tidewater Trail in Spotsylvania County. It is the region’s newest retail health clinic, one of about 1,000 such clinics nationwide.

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In-store health clinics’ popularity grows

October 22, 2008 By Leave a Comment

As in-store health clinics continue to expand in the Pittsburgh market, research is raising concerns about their long-term viability.

Featuring upfront, no-frills menus limited to routine needs, retail clinics embrace a 15-minute, fast-food approach to health care that has gained in popularity.

Since the first such clinics opened here two years ago, the number has grown. The Pittsburgh area is expected to have 24 retail clinics by the end of the year, almost evenly divided between Take Care centers at Walgreens and MinuteClinics at CVS.

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Retail Health Clinics Provide Critical Access Point For Flu Shots

October 6, 2008 By Leave a Comment

The healthcare industry is prepared to provide an all-time record number of flu shots this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and retail-based convenient care clinics (CCCs) expect to administer millions of them.  With 1,000 locations in high-traffic retail outlets in 30 states, CCCs are one of the safest, most convenient, and affordable ways for consumers to get vaccinated.

Retail health clinics provide routine care for common illnesses, including prescriptions when appropriate, and offer a range of preventive services including immunizations, health screenings and basic physical exams.  They are open seven days a week, including extended weekday hours, and are located adjacent to pharmacies in retail locations. No appointment is necessary and most visits last less than 15 minutes. These clinics can make getting a flu shot very simple for patients who may already be visiting retail outlets for grocery shopping and other needs.

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Retail clinic users lack personal doctors

September 25, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Retail health clinics are attracting patients who are not “routine users of the current health-care system,” authors of a new study say.

“For these patients, the convenience offered by retail clinics may be more important than the continuity provided by a personal physician,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Ateev Mehrotra, a Rand Corp. researcher and professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

The study, by the non-profit Rand Corp., is believed to be unique in that it examined the types of patients using the system. The findings are also published in the September/October issue of the journal Health Affairs.

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Retail health clinics catching on

September 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Bill Takeshita headed to a retail clinic recently for a $15 tuberculosis test. While he was there, he decided he might as well get his cholesterol level checked too.

Takeshita, the chief of optometry at the Center for the Partially Sighted in Tarzana, needed the TB test as a requirement for his facility to receive government funding.

“I heard about this through word of mouth, from another doctor,” Takeshita said recently as he stopped by the MinuteClinic, a retail health clinic inside a Reseda CVS store. “This is something that is quick and convenient.”

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Study Examines Role of Retail Health Clinics

September 19, 2008 By Leave a Comment

As the number of retail health clinics swells to more than 1,000 nationwide, new research suggests that the clinics may be emerging as safety net providers for patients who don’t have a usual source of health care.

The study, Retail Clinics, Primary Care Physicians, and Emergency Departments: A Comparison of Patients’ Visits, was conducted by the Rand Corp. and published in the September/October Health Affairs.

Researchers focused on data provided by retail clinic companies that are members of the Convenient Care Association, a Philadelphia-based organization founded in 2006 to represent retail clinics. The companies submitted de-identified data on all clinic visits through the summer of 2007.

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Retail-Store Medical Clinics Don’t Step on Toes of Primary Care Physicians

September 12, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Ten common complaints account for nearly all patient visits to retail medical clinics, frequently staffed by nurse practitioners or physician’s assistants, that have popped up in stores such as Wal-Mart, researchers here said.

These conditions represented 90.3% of visits to the so-called retail clinics, compared with 18.1% of visits to primary care physicians and 12% of emergency department visits, found Ateev Mehrotra, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of Pittsburgh and the RAND Corporation, and colleagues.

Their study, reported in the September/October issue of Health Affairs, also disclosed that 61.3% of retail clinic patients (SE 0.04%) had no regular primary care physician.

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