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Originally Posted by Highwayman  That really strikes me as odd OoD. Why would a business NOT want to branch out into a growing segment of the market? Retail clinics are not going to go away if you ignore them. I would think that a retail clinic would pull in more business for a hospital because of referrals for things found by the doctors at the clinic. |
The primary words are retail and "the things found by the doctors".
The successful business model for those things is a limited set of symptons, concentrating on cold, flu, ear aches, sore throats run by a nurse practioner or physician assistant. They don't have to and more often don't provide any diagnostic services. The pharmacies hope the pts will get their scripts filled there and any patient presenting with complex symptons is sent to the local ER or told to make arragements with a physician. The initial models were cash and carry so to speak with no insurance but has KS stated that part has changed but only somewhat.
Walgreens can hire a nurse practioner, give him/her a little office, decide what patients they will and will not see, get the business license, and that's about it. In Indiana we would have essentially had to open a mini-ER with all the associated costs and we could not differentiate the patients it served without running afoul of the access laws that make hospitals the provider of last resort. The intent was to move less critical patients out of the ER and get them care cheaper and quicker. We just couldn't do it in the regulatory environment hospitals operate in. In our case, even if we could work around those rules the self imposed tenets of Catholic Healthcare made it not feasible for our situation. That's not to say that another health system or a system in a different state could not find it feasible, but for us it didn't make business sense.