When Jennifer Searfoss realized she had a urinary tract infection, she made a decision more and more Americans are making: She went to a retail health clinic for care.
"I knew I could go to a MinuteClinic and in 30 minutes not only get my prescription – they would fill it there and I could walk out with my drugs," the 33-year-old healthcare attorney said. "That's the beauty of what they offer."
According to a recent report on retail health clinics by Kalorama Information, retail clinics are continuing to grow, fueled by rising healthcare costs, inconsistent quality of care, long wait times for appointments and a rising number of consumers who are uninsured or underinsured.
The report noted that total retail clinic sales at U.S. clinics came to an estimated $733.4 million in 2010, an increase of 81 percent from 2005. Sales are expected to expand another 19.3 percent, to $1.7 billion, through 2015.
Once following a cash-only, autonomous business model, retail health clinics have been making changes as they face a fluctuating climate brought on by healthcare reform.
While maintaining a core business model of providing convenience and basic health services at a low cost, retail clinics now accept health insurance and have been expanding their services to include chronic disease care for illnesses such as diabetes and hypertension. They also have been increasing their collaborations with health systems.
MinuteClinic, owned by CVS, is the market leader in the retail health clinic industry, accounting for nearly 600 of the approximately 1,479 retail clinics nationwide. The company plans on adding 100 clinics a year for the next four years, beginning next year, to top 1,000 clinics by 2015, said MinuteClinic president Andrew Sussman, MD.
In May, Sussman announced that MinuteClinic had established clinic collaborations with six health systems, including the Cleveland Clinic, Allina and Catholic Healthcare West. He said more collaborations are on the horizon.
"We don't see MinuteClinic as a separate autonomous system. We see it as complimentary to the medical home," he said. "We feel like we are fulfilling an important gap in the current healthcare system."
The American Academy of Family Practitioners, which once supported retail clinics but has been critical of them since they began expanding their services to chronic disease management, believes the clinics are adding to the system's fragmentation rather than filling a gap in it.
"If it doesn't improve coordination over time, if it doesn't offer the patient a team of caregivers … are you really improving the system?" asked AAFP president Roland Goertz, MD. "Convenience is great, but there is no proof that convenience results in good care over time."
The concern about care disruption has merit, said Bruce Carlson, Kalorama's publisher, but also must be put in context.
"Would a patient have obtained that flu shot or that cholesterol check if they had to wait in a physician's office?" he asked.