urgent care – The Health Care Blog

A Tale of Two Sore Throats: On Retail Clinics and Urgent Care

Jan 28, 2015• 51

By LESLIE KERNISAN, MD

Six years ago, just after arriving in Baltimore for a winter conference, I fell sick with fever and a bad sore throat.

After a night of feeling awful, I went looking for help. I found it at a Minute Clinic in a CVS near the hotel. I was seen right away by a friendly NP who did a rapid strep test, and prescribed me medication. I picked up my medication at the pharmacy there. The visit cost something like $85, and took maybe 30 minutes. They gave me forms to submit to my California insurance. And I was well enough to present my research as planned by day 3 of the conference.

Fast forward to this year. After feeling a bit blah on a Monday evening, I developed a sore throat, headache, and fever overnight.

I figured it was a winter viral pharyngitis, rearranged my schedule, and planned to make it an “easy day.” Usually a low-key day plus a good night’s sleep does the trick for me.

But not with this bug.

Competing With Urgent Care

Jan 2, 2015• 11

By MARC-DAVID MUNK, MD

About seven years ago, the California Healthcare Roundtable and HealthAffairs sat down to prepare a white paper on the emerging “phenomenon” of urgent care centers, and what it might mean for primary care. At the time the group couldn’t agree that urgent care was a “disruptive” innovation, but it seemed clear to all participants that it represented a threat to primary care: The rise of UC, the group noted, would lead to 1) less preventive care and 2) concentrate acuity in primary care clinics. They wrote: “[Urgent care] means fewer patients per day, a higher intensity environment for providers, and potentially lower reimbursement.”

In particular, the group couldn’t understand if patients were choosing to leave primary care because they didn’t value having a PCP, or if they were settling for the inherent limitations of UC because cost and convenience outweighed its disadvantages.

Seventy-five percent [of UC customers] are women ages 28 to 42 and their children. Some hypothesize that this consumer group thinks of its health care relationships differently than do people of the baby boomer generation and older. The younger cohort often has no “medical home,” while baby boomers and older people tend to view the primary care physician as the center of their medical care. Discussants concurred that what the data do not reveal, however, is whether the medical “homelessness” of this younger group and its high relative use of retail clinics reflect how these consumers want to receive their care or is instead merely their experience (or is a function of the fact that they have fewer chronic conditions and thus need less care and care coordination).

Since the roundtable in 2007, there has been a flood of urgent care centers with ongoing rapid growth. The American Academy of Urgent Care estimates that there are around 9300 UCs nationally. Across the country, clinics are sprouting like flowers, sometimes fueled by private equity investors, but often by hospitals and health systems who are reflexively installing UCs in repurposed strip malls, sometimes without a clear strategy other than “keeping market share” in an otherwise low margin business.

The reasons for growth, according to the American Academy of Urgent Care? Primarily extended hours (as compared to primary care) and better wait times and lower prices than the ED.

As the private-equity fueled urgent care bubble expands, here’s my prediction on how this all plays out: Don’t bet the farm on UCs being the final answer to the consumer’s search for value. For all of UC’s utility, it’s also possible that urgent care may just get out- maneuvered by the next generation of primary care.

Are Retail Clinics Dangerous?

Sep 28, 2012• 6

By Sanjay Bansu, MD

Target, Walgreens and CVS have recently started medical clinics in their stores. Opening up these “retail clinics” seems both potentially profitable and, at first blush, somehow pushes the lines on our tradition view of where medical services should be located. Giving the concept of retail clinics some thought might reveal store-based providers to be convenient and cost-effective, or alternatively full of conflicts of interest and potential harms. Should we be worried about retail clinics turning into the Walmart of medicine?

The retail clinic industry appears to have grown rapidly over the last few years. Most of these clinics are run by three large chains–Target, Walgreens and CVS–but there are also a mix of smaller providers branching out of existing chains like the Mayo Clinic. Their primary use seems to be the treatment of acute “urgent care” conditions such as symptomatic treatment of upper respiratory tract infections (lots of sore throats), or providing simple preventive care such as vaccinations. Most patients who visit these retail clinics will see a nurse practitioner. According to a recent study that tracked the growth of these clinics from 2007 to 2009, there was a four-fold rise in the number of these clinics, such that there are now over 1,200 retail clinics that see almost 6 million visits per year.