The so-called “retailization” of healthcare is picking up significant steam, especially after the high-profile announcement from Kaiser Permanente and Target Corp last week, wherein Kaiser will staff four Southern California clinics.
That follows a steady push by retail pharmacies like Walgreens, CVS Health and Rite Aid into the primary care setting, and as the trend gains further traction, traditional primary care providers ought to be watching closely, lest the get surpassed as new providers take services directly to patients and consumers.
That’s the view from The Advisory Board Company, a Washington D.C.-based healthcare consultancy. From Dr. Lisa Bielamowicz in a blog post:
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“I recently took my kids to Walgreens, but it wasn’t to pick up a prescription or to stock up on candy. It was for primary care. And if this experience represents the new standard for primary care delivery, traditional physician practices should be watching retailers like Walgreens very closely.”
Most telling, she noted, was the pure convenience – on a Saturday, no less – of a new Walgreens Clinic in DC.
“…One of my kids woke up with a bad sore throat (pretty sure it was strep), the other one needed a flu shot, and our regular pediatrician doesn’t do weekend appointments.”
Dr. Bielamowicz then went on to list a litany of new trends evident in the new Walgreens Clinic, which she posits could be the new primary care delivery model:
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— Centralized online scheduling
— Extended hours (again, a Saturday, meaning she didn’t have to take time off of work)
— Price transparency; in this case, there was no copay and a list of cash prices for those who are uninsured. Such a simple, consumer-friendly approach to pricing has been virtually nonexistent at traditional practices, though transparency is catching on quickly, as well.
— A broad range of services, including disease management. This is in part why the Kaiser-Target collaboration raised eyebrows. The retail clinic space in the past was relatively limited to things like flu shots and other vaccines, maybe some simple diagnosis for common ailments. “Seeing how easy it was to find and make an appointment, you could easily imagine some patients choosing to visit a clinic like this for care of their chronic conditions like diabetes or hypertension,” Dr. Bielamowicz notes.
— Professional clinic facility. Expanding on the broad range of services, the Walgreens clinic, she said, “could be indistinguishable from many primary care offices,” including electronic medical records. It’s a “far cry from the ‘NP in a close’” model of previous retail clinics, she said.
In sum, this should be a swift wake-up call for primary care practices.
My visit to the Walgreens clinic left me wondering how long typical primary practices were going to be able to maintain their existing ways of operating, especially because it’s not just Walgreens moving into the health care delivery business…
The reality is clinics like those that these retail giants have been launching deliver a better product than traditional primary care for many attributes that consumers value highly. We recently ran a large-scale primary care consumer survey that found that when patients choose primary care providers, they are most concerned with access, convenience, and transparency—and not particularly attuned to brand or reputation. Or their relationship with their personal primary care physician.
It’s worth noting that health systems have been shifting to primary care following the ACA and ACOs and new payment models that reward prevention versus volume. But, going back to the Kaiser-Target news, it’s clearly not enough to just stock up on docs and hope patients come to you. If a massive system like Kaiser is taking heed, it seems likely that the trend will only accelerate.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing for the health systems, who will still have an important, yet evolving role as the primary care delivery model becomes more “customized” toward the consumer, Dr. Bielamowicz said.
