Marketplace

JUCM and JUCM News have been tracking Walmart’s unsuccessful efforts to become a go-to destination for their customers’ healthcare needs for years. The idea that shoppers would appreciate the convenience of getting a strep test or a flu shot where they buy tires simply hasn’t caught on among healthcare consumers. Now Dollar General apparently thinks it has a shot at getting the idea right among its acknowledged customer base of lower-income, largely rurally located Americans. …

Just a few short years ago, it appeared that tech innovator Apple had plans to veer away from its expertise by entering the brick-and-mortar healthcare marketplace. As JUCM News reported at the time, it started by hiring more than 40 physicians to provide on-site care for employees—but also to advise the company on future healthcare strategies. The idea was that they would ultimately launch primary care locations for the general public. Now it appears the …

Freestanding emergency rooms have been the bane of many urgent care operator’s existence—and a source of outrage for patients who wind up getting stuck with a hefty and unexpected bill after seeking care at such facilities. Legislative bodies in multiple states have taken steps to prevent freestanding ED operators from hitting patients with surprise bills while trying to mandate price transparency, but Colorado has done them one step better. The state is incentivizing administrators to …

As JUCM and JUCM News readers know, Walmart has taken any number of stabs at trying to establish a successful healthcare business (all to no avail, at this point). Having failed to gain traction with physical Walmart Health locations, they’ve now gone the virtual route by acquiring telehealth provider MeMD and parted ways with a number of Walmart Health senior executives in the process. Whether you view the latest move as evolution in its strategy …

The COVID-19 pandemic seemed to have put a deep freeze on urgent care acquisitions, so maybe it’s a good sign of things to come that Bain Capital just announced a deal to acquire New England-based ConvenientMD from Starr Investment Holdings. While the value of the deal was not revealed, ConvenientMD’s 26 locations in Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire took in around $105 million in revenue last year. Early plans under the new ownership call for …

The urgent care industry has been working tirelessly for decades to highlight its ability to provide immediate, high-quality care at a fraction of the cost of a trip to the emergency room. If a story published recently in Health Affairs is any indication, those efforts are paying off in reducing lower-acuity visits to the ED. Looking at insurance claims and enrollment data amassed by a managed care plan between 2008 and 2019, researchers noted that …

Trinity Health is known as one of the largest Catholic healthcare delivery systems in the U.S., with a track record of operating hospitals and urgent care centers successfully both clinically and operationally. The larger markets where it has urgent care centers, cities such as Detroit, Hartford, Philadelphia, and Tampa, however, tend to be saturated with a multitude of urgent care operators, hindering Trinity’s potential to grow its urgent care footprint. That may change now that …

Fear of COVID-19 and confusion over the capabilities of urgent care centers are still combining to lead some patients to make poor decisions over where they seek care, and just what level of care they really need. Evidence of this is clear in a report aired recently by KRGV television in the Rio Grande Valley region of Texas. A woman there woke up one morning achy and having a hard time breathing. She felt more …

In such a topsy-turvy year, it only makes sense that a changing urgent care landscape is making headlines as 2020 comes to a close. First, WellNow Urgent Care announced that it has acquired Hometown Urgent Care & Occupational Health and its 34 locations across Ohio and Michigan. That move nearly doubles WellNow’s size and moves it onto the list of top 10 urgent care companies in the country. Not to be outdone, FastMed Urgent Care …

The recent closure of an urgent care center in Hartselle, AL, as reported by local television station WAFF, has left regular patients scrambling to find new options for same-day care. Some patients who came to rely on the practice as a de facto primary care office are in especially dire straits, needing a quick refill of subscriptions for hypertension and other chronic conditions. While the reason for this particular urgent care center’s sudden closing is …