Retail Healthcare News

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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Convenient health care just became a little easier to access for CIGNA HealthCare members in Dallas-Fort Worth, and Little Rock, Ark. as the company adds MedBasics Family Health Centers to its network, effective March 1, 2008.

“MedBasics Family Health Centers work well for the average American, always on the go,” said Kenneth Phenow, M.D., market medical executive for CIGNA. “From the parent trying to get a child’s immunizations up to date while running between children’s many activities to the working adult trying to get a minor illness checked during a lunch hour, retail clinics offer an affordable, efficient and convenient option.”

MedBasics Family Health Centers are located in Carnival Super Markets in Dallas-Fort Worth and inside USA Drug Stores in Little Rock, Ark., and are open seven days a week, with extended evening and weekend hours. Members who visit MedBasics can receive a variety of routine, non-urgent and preventative medical services including immunizations, flu shots and treatments of common illnesses such as allergies, bladder infections, bronchitis, ear and sinus infections, fever and strep throat. Most visits are completed in an average of 15 minutes.

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In 2004, President Bush laid out the goal for most Americans to have electronic health records by 2014, and Wal-Mart seems intent on doing its part. Not only is the retailer rolling out e-health records to tens of thousands of its employees and their dependents in connection with Dossia, a consortium of eight large employers that includes AT&T (NYSE: T) and Intel (NSDQ: INTC), but it’s also requiring the use of e-health record software for patients treated at the in-store clinics it’s about to launch.

Wal-Mart unveiled the first of its “The Clinic At Wal-Mart” sites earlier this month in Arkansas, and it has plans for more than 400 in Atlanta, Dallas, and Little Rock by 2010, including rebranding some of the 55 or so clinics that now operate in Wal-Mart stores. As part of this push, Wal-Mart says it signed a letter of intent to work with RediClinic, which specializes in walk-in clinics, and local hospital systems to co-brand clinics in 200 Wal-Mart Supercenters. For example, Wal-Mart is partnering with St. Vincent Health System, a part of the Catholic Healthcare Initiatives system, to open four co-branded clinics in Little Rock. Wal-Mart expects to open more than 2,000 clinics nationwide by 2014.

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Are a patient’s symptoms more likely to get digitally documented into an electronic medical record at the convenience clinic inside Wal-Mart than at his or her own doctor’s office? Possibly.

The emergence in the last few years of convenience health clinics operated in the stores of retailers such as CVS, Walgreen’s, and now Wal-Mart has brought with it an unexpected twist.

Besides providing quick tests for strep throat and prescriptions for antibiotics by nurse practitioners working in small spaces set up somewhere between the cosmetics and pet food aisles, these retailers are deploying technology tools in their clinics that most doctors still lack in their offices — e-health records and decision-support systems.

It’s estimated that fewer than 20% of U.S. doctors have deployed e-health record systems in their offices, despite the urging by health-industry experts and government officials, who have been spotlighting IT in recent years as important tools to reduce medical errors and costs.

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