Retail Healthcare News

Take Care Health Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Walgreens, has opened two local clinics since May 27 as part of a steady growth that bucks the national trend.

The first local Take Care Health Clinic opened in the Walgreens at 3336 11th St., Rockford. The second opened June 23 in Belvidere at 230 W. Chrysler Drive. Stores at 2323 Charles St. in Rockford and 5065 Hononegah Road in Roscoe are slated to open clinics by the end of the year.

Take Care’s walk-in clinics are open seven days a week and staffed by board-certified family nurse practitioners who treat patients 18 months and older for common illnesses such as sore throats and urinary infections. They also administer vaccines, offer sports physicals and are licensed to write prescriptions which can be filled at a pharmacy of the patient’s choice. 

Each Take Care clinic has a collaborating physician with whom nurse practitioners can confer by telephone. Cases outside the scope of clinic treatment are referred to physicians, and emergency cases are sent to immediate care clinics or emergency rooms.

Walgreens puts its Take Care clinics in neighborhoods with limited access issues — “where there’s not another clinic right around the corner that’s open the hours we are open” — said Wendy Edwards, Take Care’s lead nurse practitioner for the Rockford area.

“We’re really not in competition with the immediate care clinics. We’re trying to take the burden off them. A patient might go in there and just have a sore throat, when they could be seen by us instead.”

Walk-in retail clinics were hailed a year ago as the latest wave in inexpensive health care for minor ailments, although retailers such as Walgreens and CVS Caremark have been criticized because their clinics rely on nurse practitioners rather than physicians.

A plan to install Medical Mart physician-staffed walk-in clinics at two Rockford-area Kmart stores last November went by the boards when Medical Mart, a privately backed company based in Las Vegas, went out of business.

The demise was part of a larger fallout after aggressive retail clinic growth that mimicked the dot-com boom, said Tom Charland, CEO of Minnesota-based industry research firm Merchant Medicine. “We saw a lot of irrationality, people getting into the retail clinic business thinking if they opened, people would come.”

The number of retail clinics nationwide nearly quadrupled from 202 to 710 in the year between October 2006 and 2007. Then industry growth slowed.

By April 2008, the total had only reached 964. And many of the privately backed retail clinic companies — such as Medical Mart and My Healthy Access which had clinics in some Wal Mart stores — had gone bust.

It was all about the money, Charland said.

“Many of the new operators were getting funding from private investors before they had a business model, so they were burning cash.” Charland said. “The interest of their investors was in making money.”

Retailers such as Walgreens with its Take Care clinics and CVS with its MinuteClinics take a more long-term view, he said.

“The clinic is a destination, so there are new people coming into their stores who wouldn’t be there otherwise,” Charland said. “And about 25 percent of those patients represent new prescription customers. Even if you haven’t hit break-even (with the clinics), you still have this other benefit going on.”

Even industry leader CVS, which has grown aggressively, cut its MinuteClinic locations from 513 in April to 511 by late June and has announced it is scaling back growth plans, according to Merchant Medicine data.

Walgreens grew its Take Care locations from 158 to 183 during that same time, and said in late June it was on track for 400 clinics by year’s end.

Walgreens does not divulge its costs of building a Take Care clinic, but does expect each new clinic to take two or three years to turn a profit, Take Care Health Systems spokeswoman Lauren Tierney said.

“That’s not an unusual time frame,” she said. “When we open a new drugstore, there’s also a typical two- to three-year period before the store turns profitable.”

That long-term approach seems to prevail at the Rockford Take Care clinic as well. It has seen about 50 patients in the month since its opening, an average of one or two a day, Edwards said. “We’re really doing better than expected,” she said.

The clinics advertise and send direct-mail pieces to their surrounding neighborhoods, but most patients come by word-of-mouth, Edwards said.

Take Care started locally with a staff of eight nurse practitioners when it opened its Rockford store. Edwards anticipates raising that total to 12 by mid-July to cover the Rockford and Belvidere locations.

The local clinics also are compiling a growing list of local physicians to whom they can refer patients who need primary care physicians or specialists.

Nurse practitioners for the Rockford clinic have a list of 10 such physicians so far, Edwards said. They are canvassing the Belvidere area to start a similar list, she said.

Source: HealthyRockford.com
Original Publication Date: June 30, 2008