Retail Healthcare News

The first of the new Clinic at Wal-Mart walk-in centers, as they will be called, is to open in Little Rock, Ark., in April and be run by nurse practitioners employed by the St. Vincent Health System, a three-hospital group in central Arkansas.

Wal-Mart also says it plans to brand 200 of the new clinics with RediClinics, one of the Revolution Health companies of Steven Case, the AOL co-founder. Those are to be operated in partnership with various local health care providers. RediClinic, which already operates 13 clinics in Wal-Mart stores, plans to open one of the new units in Atlanta in April and another in Dallas next summer.

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Walk-in clinic operator CheckUps, the resident provider for Wal-Mart, closed its doors last month. What does the company’s demise tell us about the walk-in clinic industry, hitherto fertile ground for entrepreneurial small companies?

Walk-in clinics appeal to patients who want basic care without an appointment. Patients visit the clinics, most of which stay open seven days a week, for basic health screenings and treatment for routine ailments. Most clinics are busiest during evenings and weekends when doctors’ offices are closed and emergency rooms are the only other treatment option.

Walk-in clinics tend to treat about 25 to 30 common ailments, which tend to be upper respiratory ailments in the winter and rashes in the summer, says Tine Hansen-Turton, executive director of the Convenient Care Association (CCA), which represents 95% of clinic operators. She estimates that about 30% of the walk-in clinic patients don’t have a primary care physician.

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Recently, CheckUps, retail clinics operating in Wal-marts, closed 23 of its 81 locations, citing debt and the inability to pay its medical staff and vendors. However, Wal-mart executives are still planning to lease space to several hundred clinics over the next two years and to offer space to up to 2,000 clinics in the next six years.

While this news isn’t slowing down the superstore, how will other organizations react to it? Will the results for this organization have an effect on retail clinic strategies of other organizations? Is this a warning for other retail clinics?

During a recent HealthSounds podcast, HIN spoke with Dr. Thomas Atkins, medical director of Sutter Express Care, drugstore-based medical clinics that are part of Sutter Health’s network of hospitals and doctors serving northern California, about establishing locations for retail clinics, sharing information with PCPs and the impact retail clinics can have on reducing non-emergent ED usage as well as healthcare costs.

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Apparently a company called CheckUps has been operating walk-in medical clinics in Wal-mart stores in Florida and three other Southern states.

I did not know this until I read that CheckUps, based in New York, fell behind in paying its nurses and other vendors late last year, apparently running short of cash to meet its bills, according to a lawyer for one of its creditors.

Wal-Mart said Monday that it was concerned about the impact on clinic customers. “It is obviously not a good thing that CheckUps has decided to close,” said Deisha Galberth, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman.

Starting with three clinics it acquired in Florida, CheckUps added 20 more last year in Wal-Mart stores, expanding to Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. Industry experts estimate that a company can consume $300,000 to $600,000 to finance a clinic and keep it running until it passes the break-even point of 25 to 30 patients a day and becomes profitable.

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CheckUps, a start-up operator of walk-in medical clinics, has shut down 23 of the clinics operating in Wal-Mart stores in Florida and three other Southern states.

CheckUps, based in New York, fell behind in paying its nurses and other vendors late last year, apparently running short of cash to meet its bills, according to a lawyer for one of its creditors.

Nurses arriving for work at the clinics on Jan. 18 found them to be closed.

CheckUps stopped paying some of its nurse practitioners in December, and it owes about $108,000 to Medtracker Personnel, said Stephanie Granda, a lawyer for Medtracker Personnel, a Louisiana employment agency that provided nurses to CheckUps clinics.

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