Retail medical clinics

I for one think they’re a good idea.

Here’s a prescription for pediatricians fighting to keep easy-to-treat, well-paying patients: Expand after-hours and weekend services to serve desperate parents in search of quick remedies for their kids’ late-night sore throats and upset tummies. Otherwise, parents will continue choosing the closest CVS, Walgreens or H-E-B clinic.

With the store-based medical clinic business projected to double between 2012 and 2015, analysts and doctors say pediatricians must change their business model to fit parents’ needs. Otherwise, they risk losing their relatively lucrative patients and relying more on chronically ill ones who take longer to diagnose and treat and thus reduce the number of people that doctors can see in a day.

“Well-baby cases help compensate for a Medicaid enrollee who takes half an hour,” said Devon Herrick, senior fellow at the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. He added that the speed and convenience of retail clinics attract many of the better-paying cases, and doctors are working to keep from losing them.

Despite clear demand in the market, doctors have for years targeted retail clinics for criticism. They argue that doctors best understand their patients’ needs and provide the best care. Most recently, the American Academy of Pediatrics urged parents to avoid store-based health clinics, saying they don’t provide the high-quality care children need.

However, the nation’s leading professional organizations for doctors repeatedly have said there aren’t enough doctors to treat everyone now and won’t be in years to come. The American Academy of Family Physicians projects a shortage of 40,000 doctors nationwide by 2020. Texas already has a ratio of about 165 doctors for every 100,000 residents, which falls below the national average of 220 physicians for every 100,000 people.

“It’s about competition,” said Dr. Kaveh Safavi, global managing director of Accenture health business, adding that retailers came up with the idea for “embedded clinics” because people needed them.

He described pediatricians’ concerns with retail clinics as a “short-term skirmish” that doctors have been waging for years.

[…]

Texas Children’s Hospital’s chief medical officer, Dr. Stan Spinner, recently posted in a hospital website blog that retail clinics employ providers who lack proper training and experience treating children.

“As a pediatrician for more than 25 years, I’ve seen firsthand the inadequate care these clinics can provide,” Spinner wrote. “Numerous patients have come into our Texas Children’s pediatrics practices after visiting a retail-based clinic the night before questioning the medication or dosage they had received.”

When asked to elaborate later, Spinner said he didn’t know how many such incidents had occurred. He said parents waste time and resources at retail clinics and then follow up with pediatricians to ensure children received the correct treatment.

“(Pediatricians) should have seen them the very first time,” Spinner said, adding that some pediatricians are expanding their office hours and working weekends to accommodate patients.

All due respect, Doc, but there are bad physicians out there, too. I’d take your complaint more seriously if we had a more effective means of policing them, but between tort “reform” and the impotence of the Texas Medical Board, there ain’t much that can be done. Be that as it may, my own anecdotal evidence favors the retail clinics. A few years back, what I had figured was an insect bite on my left foot had turned into something painful and alarmingly swelled on a Saturday morning. With my alternatives being a visit to the emergency room and a fervent wish that it wouldn’t get any worse by Monday, I visited a clinic at the HEB on Bunker Hill. They prescribed some meds that did the trick, and by the time I did see my doctor on Monday, my foot looked mostly normal again, and he agreed with their diagnosis. Faced with the same situation again, I’d have no hesitation to pay them another visit.

One more thing:

Retail clinics revolve around a high-volume, low-complexity business model. Services usually range from $59 to $99. They include convenient and basic care – physicals, disease monitoring, vaccinations, and illness and infection diagnosis and treatment. The clinics usually employ nurse practitioners and physician assistants, who are less expensive than doctors.

[…]

Retail clinics will hold nearly 11 million visits annually, saving about $800 million in unnecessary emergency care costs, Accenture said.

One of the dirty secrets of health care and the amount that we spend on it is that controlling our health care costs necessarily means paying less money to doctors. It’s more complex than that, of course – prescription drug costs and a lack of transparency in pricing are other big factors – but in the end, less money being spent by consumers means less money being paid to providers. Given that there’s a shortage of general practice physicians anyway, more retail clinics and a greater use of advanced practice nurses are both modest steps in the right direction. Doctors are going to have to learn to live with that.

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