Walk-in clinics

Driving forces / Opinion/commentary/analysis / Retail clinics / Tactical innovation / Walk-in clinics — No Comments
6
Jul 10

Health Care as Information Care: View From The Street

Sure, plenty of articles, news blurbs, tweets, and other stuff has been issued about personal health records (I’m blazing a new trail: The Term Doesn’t Need Capitalizing Anymore. You read it here first), but few really acknowledge the primacy of information care in the realm of routine primary care the way this recent Chicago Sun-Times article does:

Health Records In A Snap (7/3/10, immediate access – no registration/subscription required).

We’re not sure reporter Sandra Guy identifies the potential alternative futures perfectly, but she does a more than respectable job:

One key question is how electronic records from these kinds of centers will talk to other electronic records being generated by a growing number of retail clinics and health-screening kiosks, as well as at hospitals, emergency rooms and primary-care doctors offices.

Will the system end up like the United States’ cellular-phone system, with a variety of underlying network standards that are able to talk with one another, albeit with expensive roaming fees? Or will a single standard be mandated?

There’s plenty of room for alternatives between these rather stark choices, and we would have liked to see some of those referenced in this general interest piece. But that’s exactly what enthuses us about this article – it’s a general interest piece that frames the connection between “better” primary care and “better” means of communicating about that care more lucidly than most of its kind.

Clinic openings and closings / Driving forces / Lab tests and clinics / Retail clinics / Strategic initiatives / Walk-in clinics — No Comments
6
Jul 10

Emerging retail clinic models: Zoom, zoom

We’re somewhat embarrassed to say we’ve never heard of ZoomCare until last Thursday.

ZoomCare, a cluster of 4 (soon to be 6) clinics in & around Portland, Oregon, is a mixed-clinician (MDs and PAs) model that

  • has a clear, crisp, 6-point* value proposition,
  • is not Rx hosted, retailer-hosted, or hospital-hosted,
  • fills treatment-related scripts & does labs on-site in its clinics
  • does not focus on employed populations**, and
  • alludes to a plan to build out its own network of care providers beyond ZoomCare’s walls.

*ZoomCare’s homepage does indicate EIGHT things they would like you to know about them – but at least one of those extra items is a bit misleading. Number 8 says they offer “online help 7 days a week”, but that online help consists of enabling you to make an appointment for a conventional clinic visit during their regular business hours. Online scheduling can be very helpful – but there is no teleclinician availability for off-hours issues at ZoomCare.

** while ZoomCare makes no specific pitch to employers at its website, one of its testimonials suggests just the kind of thing the ZoomCare team would certainly not mind taking place all over Oregon….

….I just wanted to say again how much I appreciate the service that you are offering at ZoomCare. I will be sending an email to the president and the CEO of New Seasons Market (my employer) to let them know about you guys. I think that ZoomCare is exactly the thing the majority of our employees need in terms of health care. I hope that I can help you with some referrals….

Driving forces / Health care practitioners / Reports, white papers, studies, presentations / Retail clinics / Walk-in clinics — Comments Off
11
Mar 10

Retail Care Convenience Has a Price

…and consumers readily name it, according to a study published Monday in the Annals of Family Medicine.

Physician Office vs Retail Clinic: Patient Preferences in Care Seeking for Minor Illnesses (Ahmed and Fincham, Annals of Family Medicine, 2010;8:117-123. Immediate access) finds:

Willingness-to-pay estimates suggest that, all else being equal, a cost savings of $31.42 would be required for the respondents to seek care from a nurse practitioner at a retail clinic. Similarly, a cost savings of $82.12 would be required for them to choose to wait 1 day or more.

It would be easy to infer from this that, as long as the bill for a retail clinic’s services is $31.42 or more lower than an available physician’s charge for the same treatment visit, a consumer is likely to pick the retail clinic over Dr. Welby.

The authors are careful to note, however, that

It cannot be determined from our study…whether the relative importance of the time and cost attributes would remain the same when the choice is between seeking care from a nurse practitioner or physician assistant in a physician-led primary care practice and seeking care from a nurse practitioner or physician assistant at a retail clinic.

We find this a particularly important qualifier, and a great opportunity for any enterprising health care researchers looking for a valuable follow-up study to undertake.

Not surprisingly, the report concludes:

Time and cost savings offered by retail clinics are attractive to patients, and they are likely to seek care there given sufficient cost savings. Appointment wait time is the most important factor in care-seeking decisions and should be considered carefully in setting appointment policies in primary care practices.

The report’s release was news in the Los Angeles Times, on UPI, and Bioscience Technology on Tuesday and Wednesday – though it must be noted that the Times filed it under a section of the paper whose tagline is “Oddities, Musings, and News from the Health World”.

Clinic openings and closings / Retail clinics / Retail clinics: field reports / Take Care Health / Walk-in clinics — Comments Off
21
Feb 10

Walgreens’ Duane Reade Acquisition: The Retail Clinics’ Take

Go to Healthcare 311 – use that handy link over to the right there – yes, that’s the one, right up top – and run a quick search for clinics within 25 miles of New York, NY.

Note the number of results.

Now run the same search for Chicago, IL (neighborhood of Walgreens HQ), or Orlando, FL, or Atlanta, GA.

Compare the results. (Thanks for playing, and no, this exercise was not specifically a plug for our free and industry-leading clinics search utility. Really. It wasn’t.)

Hmmm……

We would guess you’re asking yourself “Why so few retail clinics in NYC”? There are a bunch of possibilities, which we won’t go into here (if you have a favorite theory, please add a comment).

We have the distinct feeling, unsubstantiated by any formal announcements from Walgreens or TakeCare Health other than the news of WAG’s purchase of the NYC-based pharmacy chain, that there will be more, soon; and/or that the number NYC-based employers in TakeCare Employer Solutions growing book of corporate clients will rise in the near future.

Duane Reade, in the form of its collaboration with DR Walk-In Medical Care, is already the NYC retail clinics’ market leader. Its format uses physicians as the care providers, rather than RNs/PAs. Direct reference to DR Walk-In is hard to find at Duane Reade’s main site – not sure what that means about the organization’s commitment to the retail clinic concept; as we know, even the big clinics operators make finding their locations more difficult than it ought to be.

Clinic openings and closings / Driving forces / MinuteClinic / Strategic initiatives / Tactical innovation / Walk-in clinics — Comments Off
17
Feb 10

Checking Up on Retail Health & Convenient Care Developments

MinuteClinic has introduced something they are calling Monthly Check-Up, the purpose of which is along the lines of what the name implies:

expert advice, great tips and timely news — all to your inbox

the service notice comes complete with a free gift offer, redeemable at your nearest MinuteClinic. We don’t know if the gift offer differs from recipient to recipient. Give it a try, & let us know what you experience.

(ours was complimentary hand sanitizer).

In international news, select localities in Britain may test a “111″ phone number to simplify access to non-emergency health treatment:

A health hotline number could be tested as part of a revamp of out-of-hours services.
People would be able to dial 111 if they needed urgent treatment which was not an emergency. They would then be directed to hospital, an urgent care centre or a GP surgery.

(Feb 17, 2010 Melton Times, immediate access)

All we at Healthcare 311 can say is, we’re reserving ourselves a special phone number, just to be prepared….

Clinic openings and closings / Driving forces / Retail clinics / Strategic initiatives / Tactical innovation / Walk-in clinics — Comments Off
1
Feb 10

BCBS FL opens retail ‘store’ in Tampa

The retail health insurance store concept is nothing new for Blues plans, including BCBS Florida. What we haven’t seen before is alluded to in this passage of the Tampa Bay Online story on BCBS FL’s store opening there:

The BCBS location, at 201 N. West Shore Blvd., is set up as a customer-service center, with consultants to answer member questions. But there are also nurses to greet potential members, give basic physical exams and flu shots and perform basic cholesterol tests. Over time, the location could evolve into a mini clinic, officials said.

Coming soon: “individual health insurance eligibility confirmed while U wait”?

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26
Jan 10

Continuum Health Partners and Retail Clinic Messaging: U R Doin It Rong?

The title of the 1/25/10 Crain’s New York Business sidebar is Retail clinics big success for Continuum (subscription required). Continuum Health Partners provides the medical care at Duane Reade’s 4 Manhattan walk-in clinics, branded as DR Walk-In Medical Care.

Granting that Crain’s is not a general purpose media outlet, we still feel that Adam Henick, Continuum Health Partners’ VP for ambulatory care, would like another crack at this quote: “We are absolutely seeing a flow of new patients” to the health system’s hospitals….

What about, for example, identifying those likely more numerous situations where people would have sought unnecessary ER treatment, but were spared the inconvenience and expense, thanks to DR Walk-In Medical Care’s use of Continuum-credentialled doctors?

Eh, we’re probably quibbling unnecessarily. Our general feeling, though, is that hospitals partnering with retail clinic brands – and their numbers are growing – will be most successful when they’re more careful to give the clinic brand pride of place in as many public messaging opportunities as they have the opportunity to.

We did take note of Continuum’s “plans to add another 20 locations over the next year or so, including three during the next six months”, presumably in New York City -a political subdivision with a notable scarcity of retail clinics (compared with Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, etc).

Clinic openings and closings / Retail clinics / Walk-in clinics — Comments Off
25
Jan 10

Green Shoots, vol. 2: New Clinic Openings Planned for February, April

Drug Store News reports retail clinic-model openings in Eugene OR and “>multiple locations in Florida.

Non-profit Cascade Health Systems is opening what it calls a “membership-model primary care clinic” near the Eugene Costco in February. Local TV station KMTR has a few more details at this page of their website.

Walmart plans to open 4 new Clinics at Walmart (we hope we pluralized that correctly) in Cocoa, Palm Bay, Melbourne, and Titusville FL.

Retail clinics / Walk-in clinics — Comments Off
17
Sep 09

Retail clinics “A Surprise To Many”

We enjoyed this article from the northern Ohio News Herald:

A Surprise To Many, Walk-in Clinic Inside Drugstore Looks to Fill a Need

“I worked for Mentor Police Department for 20 years and have lived around here even longer but never knew that clinic existed,” said [retired Mentor, OH police officer Noah] Thomas, who lives in Concord….”

We feel the article, and especially Officer Thomas’s remark, captures the need that Healthcare 311 addresses. If a career policeman can miss the introduction of a new health care business in his community, what chance do the rest of us have to be aware of local clinic options without reliable help?