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Retail Medical Clinics
New Customers, New Experiences
Scott MacStravic, Ph.D.
Freelance Consultant and Writer
G-CEM International Partner (US)
www.g-cem.org
This article is exclusively written for G-CEM.
The retail medical clinic movement is actually a renaissance of an earlier development in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Entrepreneurs created clinics staffed by employed physicians to offer convenient, walk-in care in urban centers for workers wishing to get care before, during, and after normal working hours. Some were sponsored by hospitals, though traditional physicians on hospitals' medical staffs typically objected, and at least one hospital executive that I know of lost his job because of the marketing communications efforts he authorized when the medical staff objected strenuously.
The new retail clinic movement has been mainly a 21st century phenomenon, and is divided into two main types:
1. "urgent care", free-standing centers that offer physician and nurse providers, serving mainly as an alternative to hospital emergency rooms with extended hours and walk-in convenience for otherwise traditional medical care
2. "convenience care" clinics, typically staffed by nurse practitioners with some sort of physician oversight from a distance, often located in large pharmacies, supermarkets and superstores
The first type is really a resurgence of the original model, with the same services and convenience for patients who don't wish to wait for their personal physician to be available, and prefer avoiding the high costs of hospital-based emergency rooms. The second type is a novel approach, reflecting the expanded scope of practice permitted for nurse practitioners, and the growing acceptance of such nurses as alternatives to physicians.
Nurse practitioner-staffed clinics typically offer services with posted fees set considerably below what physicians charge, in their traditional practices or urgent care centers. Recent studies have found that the quality of care delivered in these clinics is equal to that of its competing options, as long as patients use them for routine rather than emergency medical needs. Many hospitals in the US have sponsored or created links to these retail clinics as sources of patient referrals.
The convenience care clinics offer advantages to their hosts, as well as to patients. They bring in patients who often will fill a prescription or purchase over-the-counter drugs during their visit, generating added retail revenue volume in addition to paying rent for the space they occupy. They also serve as onsite medical clinics for employees of the stores, which in the case of "superstores" such as Wal-Mart outlets, can include large numbers of workers.
The potential for these same clinics to serve as "health centers", where patients get ongoing assistance with managing their health risks and chronic conditions adds to the reasons consumers may choose them, as well as to their value as onsite clinics for their hosts' employees. Nurse practitioners typically are far better trained in managing patients' health in a proactive way than are physicians, and find this kind of health, rather than sickness care at least as rewarding.
Given the financial advantages of having such care onsite, many employers have sponsored their own onsite retail clinics, and a number of firms will develop and operate such clinics for employers, including QuadMed, the onsite clinic arm of Quad/Graphics, a Milwaukee, Wisconsin printing company that expanded its own onsite medical centers into a separate business for other employers. Onsite clinics save employees the time and out-of-pocket costs of visiting a physician or emergency room, and can promote the health and job performance of employees who use them.
Convenience care clinics often include a separate set of services for healthy patients wishing to stay that way, or chronic disease patients who want to minimize the crises, complications and worsening risks of their condition. This creates that many more occasions for patients to visit clinics in retail stores, and that many more opportunities for them so shop there. Such stores often give patients a pager that will tell them when the nurse is available to see them while they shop, whenever the nurse is already occupied with a patient.
The "customer experiences" in retail clinics significantly expand as their scope of services increases. In addition to patients? prompt and low-cost sickness care services, their flu shots, blood pressure or other risk measure checks, and advice on personal health management add significant value at low cost and high convenience. Employers or insurance plans will often subsidize their use of such clinics because their costs are so much lower, eliminating patients? out-of-pocket costs entirely.
The other "customers", including retail store hosts, employers and insurance plans gain primarily positive financial consequences due to either revenue increases or cost savings, both in the case of retail stores that use them as onsite medical and health clinics for their employees. In addition, employers whose workers use such clinics for health management services can gain cost savings due to reduced absenteeism and presenteeism and the lost productivity due to these causes, as well as that due to visits to less convenient sources of care.
Already, in the US, there are roughly a thousand retail clinics in operation, and the number of both store-based and worksite-based examples is growing. As the shortage of primary physicians continues to get worse, the potential for such clinics as alternative sources of both sickness care and health management support is likely to continue to increase, though the competition among them will make CEM for their patients and clients a continuing and increasing challenge, as well.
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About the Author
Scott MacStravic, Ph.D. is a semi-retired freelance consultant and writer, enjoying lots of golf after a forty-year career as a health care strategy and marketing professor and executive. He is the author of ten books and over 400 articles on marketing and strategic issues in services industries.
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