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Retail healthcare clinics

Patient Access Weekly Advisor, February 6, 2008

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Retail healthcare clinics, which promise consumers shorter lines and lower costs, are the newest trend in customer convenience. The bad news for providers is that the momentum behind these clinics isn't waning.

So, with a multitude of entrepreneurial companies opening clinics by the handful, a growing number of traditional healthcare systems are entering the convenient care arena-both to ward off encroachment on their markets and to strengthen ties with the communities they serve. Along the way, many say they may have found the missing link in the continuum of care.

"We were the first to open in New Jersey, so you could say it was a defensive measure to create a competitive barrier," says Donald Parker, president of AtlantiCare Health Services, the ambulatory care wing of southeastern New Jersey-based AtlantiCare.

The Egg Harbor Township-based system is opening a network of convenient care clinics in ShopRite supermarkets across the region. Like many quick-access clinics that have opened in recent years, nurse practitioners staff AtlantiCare's HealthRite centers, which are open evening and weekend hours and are designed to treat a number of relatively low acuity conditions. Fees range from $55 to $89 and are listed on a menu of service options that patients receive when they come in for care. The system opened its first center in the fall of 2006 in Somers Point, NJ, and is on track to open four clinics by the end of 2007 and three more in 2008.

Parker says the added exposure will be helpful because the organization will open some of the HealthRite centers near the edge of AtlantiCare's current service area to attract new patients. "We have four urgent care centers, and three are right on the fringe of our market-they're patient-finders, business-developers, and relationship-builders," he says. "These retail clinics become an even more reasonably priced business to get into because the cost of entry is about one-sixth that of an urgent care center."

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