Retail Healthcare News

Already, Oklahoma has walk-in clinics in two Wal-Mart Supercenters, three CVS stores and at least one supermarket. Those numbers are expected to increase.

Last year, Wal-Mart announced plans to add 400 more clinics to Supercenters nationwide by 2010. Clinics already in operation are run by third parties, but Wal-Mart is installing co-branded clinics in 200 stores. These are partnerships between the retailer, RediClinic and local hospital systems.

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Retail health clinics have made their way into metro Detroit and are competing with doctors’ offices for routine patient visits.

Clinics contend that the quality of care is high and that when a patient requires urgent care or a visit to a physician’s office, the process is seamless, said May Hang, manager of operations in metro Detroit for Minneapolis-based MinuteClinic, a wholly owned subsidiary of CVS Pharmacy.

Doctors and other groups, though, remain skeptical about how the clinics are operated and consider them a potential competitive threat.

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At the end of the cat food aisle in Target Corp.’s Towson store, Miranda Collins toils away, evaluating sinus infections, dispensing vaccinations and measuring blood pressure.

She’s providing a new kind of convenience for customers who’ve grown used to popping in and out of big-box stores to grab everything from cereal to power tools to new shoes.

Collins is a nurse practitioner, and her little corner of the Towson Target is known as a convenient care clinic, designed to provide quick service for patients with relatively simple medical concerns.

The clinics are a growing phenomenon at retailers including CVS, Wal-Mart and Walgreen’s.

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The StayWell Co. of Lower Makefield is suing a Houston-based company for trademark infringement.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court, claims RediClinic LLC is using StayWell’s mark in advertising. StayWell claims the company, formerly known as InterFit Health, began using the mark in 2005, then stopped when it received a cease-and-desist letter from StayWell.

The suit claims RediClinic began using the mark again in 2007. StayWell, a division of MediMedia, provides health management and educational products to employers.

Source: PhillyBurbs.com
Original Publication Date: March 26, 2008

For many years, the news on “retail clinics” consisted almost entirely of stories of new ones opening everywhere. But recently, we have seen a series of stories of existing clinics closing, in a wide variety of places for a variety of reasons. It may be that, like so many innovations, retail clinics will follow the same kind of boom and bust history that has affected others, due to the fallacy of composition.

While there are many versions of this logical fallacy, its application in this case is the expectation that since the first examples of retail clinics are successful, all subsequent examples will be, also. Such optimism has affected investors in automobiles, where in the early part of the last century, literally hundreds of different companies emerged making cars, with only the “big three” having survived till the present, and their future not guaranteed. While retail clinics started slowly, they have burst into the hundreds with predictions of thousands in recent years.

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