Practice Management
The Urgent Team Family of Urgent Care & Walk-In Centers recently announced a joint venture partnership with Baptist Memorial Health Care. The venture will create a branded network of walk-in urgent and family care centers throughout key markets in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Urgent Team currently operates more than 85 centers in five states under seven brands including Baptist Memorial. Beginning in Q1 of 2024, 10 existing Urgent Team locations will launch a rebranding as …
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Retail pharmacy giant Walgreens is intensifying its expansion into provider services by launching virtual care in nine states that represent a large swath of its existing customer base, according to Fierce Healthcare. The on-demand telehealth service will cover common health needs, including urgent care services. Patients can schedule virtual consultations with healthcare professionals via chat or video. Notably, Walgreens will not accept insurance for these visits with most chat encounters priced at $33 and video …
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Telehealth provider Sesame has inked a deal with retail giant Costco to deliver virtual primary care visits for $29, according to Bloomberg. Patients, who must be members of the retailer’s warehouse club, pay strictly out-of-pocket for the visits. Providers won’t require insurance credentialing either. The strategic brand extensions of major retailers like Costco and Walmart rely on their established consumer relationships and the fact that they’re already in the daily orbit of most families. Brand recognition …
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As a $4.1 trillion industry, healthcare has a history of attracting all sorts of nontraditional players. CLEAR, the private-market version of expedited airport security, is the latest to land in the space. The company hopes to leverage its passenger identity technology to create a universal patient identity system. By partnering with institutions such as the University of Miami Health and Wellstar Health, CLEAR aims to streamline information into a single, secure account. The big health …
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Mercy Health, a hospital system based in Cincinnati, Ohio, recently opened four new urgent care centers, and more expansion is planned for 2024, according to Becker’s Hospital Review. Mercy operates five hospitals and employs 35,000 workers across Ohio and Kentucky. Seems about right: Although the pace of new site growth in urgent care slowed a bit in the past year, expansion trends show consistent upward trajectories across the country. See the 2023 list of top …
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New state laws have expanded the scope of practice for pharmacists, allowing consumers to access a longer list of health services at their local retail shop. Walmart, Walgreens Boots Alliance, and CVS Health are embracing the opportunities, aiming to boost their healthcare revenue from privately insured populations. According to a Bloomberg article, each of the retailers is rolling out everything from on-site symptom evaluation and testing to medication prescribing and treatment—all delivered by pharmacists—in 10 …
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Now open in Atlanta, DriveThru Urgent Care by Viral Solutions promises exactly what its name implies: Patients can receive a selection of care services without leaving their vehicles. According to company officials, Viral Solutions tested nearly 4 million curbside patients for COVID-19 during the pandemic, an activity which laid the groundwork for this drive-through urgent care model, which specializes in testing for and treating seasonal respiratory illnesses. The center is open seven days a week …
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A few months ago, JUCM News told you about QuikTrip’s rollout of urgent care centers (branded under the name MedWise) leveraging the real estate, marketing, and branding expertise of its gas stations. Apparently word is getting out, as an article on the initiative published by KFF Health News recently has been picked up by USA Today and various metropolitan newspapers around the country. Urgent Care Association CEO and regular JUCM contributor Lou Ellen Horwitz is quoted extensively throughout the piece—confessing that she was skeptical about QuikTrip’s plans …
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Numerous companies that have been hugely successful in various aspects of the retail business keep trying to get a foothold in healthcare. The most notorious example would probably be Walmart, which has launched unsuccessful ventures in both the brick-and-mortar and virtual spaces. The latter is now of greater interest than ever to Amazon Clinic, which launched in November 2022 but just recently became accessible to patients in every U.S. state. This initiative may have a …
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Walmart’s various forays into the healthcare space have fallen short of economic viability over a number of years. As such, it may be surprising that healthcare researchers and business schools haven’t devoted more attention to assessing why that is, or why the company continues to expend capital without much of a return to show. Finally, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business has taken a stab at it in an article published in the …
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