The title of Amer Kaissi‘s latest post at the persistently interesting Healthcare Hacks asks (we presume rhetorically) “Retail Clinics: Did The Bubble Burst?”
We extrapolate a hopeful note from his inclusion of these entries near the post’s close:
Despite these recent setbacks, a recent report suggests that while this first wave of growth might be over, the industry might be ready for a second wave in the next few years, albeit based on different models. It predicts that 2009 marked a pause between wave one and wave two of retail clinic growth and that “cautious growth is likely to resume from 2010-2011 and then accelerate from 2012-2014,”and that the total number of clinics is estimated to reach 4,000 clinics in 2015.”….
…The report suggests that the next wave of growth will mean that retail clinics will start doing more pharmacy dispensing and delivery (infusion/injection), optometry, hearing, home health aides, and additional prevention programs around wellness and healthy living….
The thing is, it seems likely to us that retail clinics are better thought of as a specific manifestation of the evolution of primary care. Organized physicians’ vigorous opposition notwithstanding, that evolution will continue, as evolutions do, implacably, simply because people want attention from knowledgeable, professional people who spend considerable time developing expertise concerning what to many of us, clinicians and non-clinicians alike, find both routine and utterly (if intermittently) necessary health treatment. People who need such care will find it where it is offered, regardless the explicit intentions of the ownership and marketers of these places.
Using the numbers Kaissi provides as a guide (we believe they’re a tad low), urgent care clinics outnumber retail clinics roughly 6 to 1, and while the business model is in several ways quite different, the thrust is similar, and the implications for primary care intriguing. Asking after the fate of retail clinics in isolation is, while understandable given their novelty, probably over-worrying the dawdling sapling while overlooking a generally healthy forest.