Retail

As we reported recently, Walgreens keeps buying properties to enhance its efforts to capture business in the primary care sector. Now, as reported by Healthcare Dive, Walmart Health says it’s going to open 28 new locations next year, including two in Missouri and Arizona—fresh territory for them. If they follow through, that will bring the total number of WH locations in the country to 75 since launching in 2019. It appears their niche will be …

As JUCM News readers know, Walgreens is among the many retail drugstores and big box merchants trying desperately to break into the primary care medicine industry. It appears they’re among the most willing to invest heavily in that crusade, too. It was only a few months ago that we told you about the company’s dream of establishing a thousand clinics in its drugstores over the next 5 years. Now, as reported by Healthcare Finance News, …

Just last week we told you that Montana is the latest U.S. state to consider granting pharmacists more authority to prescribe medications directly to patients in certain circumstances. Physician groups have protested, suggesting that the difference in training pharmacists receive vs what physicians and advanced-practice providers go through makes that prospect a patient-safety issue. There’s another, more basic question, though: How are pharmacists supposed to handle yet another important task when they’re already stretched to …

Chain drugstores continue to invest heavily in their quest to capture more primary care and urgent care patients. As JUCM News readers know, only a month or so ago CVS announced it was buying Signify, a home healthcare provider, for roughly $8 million. That was just the appetizer course, though, as it’s been revealed the company is investing $100 million in Carbon Health, a primary care and urgent care company. At the same time, Becker’s …

Retail drugstore companies continue to ask pharmacists to perform more and higher-acuity services while, simultaneously, staffing issues are forcing them to reduce hours of operation and, with that, accessibility to patients. It seems clear there’s a chasm between corporate expectations and the training pharmacists have undergone in order to become the experts they are in pharmacology—which decidedly does not include conducting exams and diagnosing illness. A nonscientific review of mainstream media coverage indicates that nearly …

As JUCM News readers are (very well) aware, Walmart has tried multiple times to gain a foothold in the U.S. healthcare marketplace in ways that could conceivably have been competitive with urgent care and existing retail health outlets. First it was with their own retail clinics, then telehealth, and buying existing primary care properties. Now, as reported by Becker’s Hospital Review, the company wants to get into the medical research business. The company said in …

CVS May Try Buying Its Way into the Primary Care Business Barely a week after we told you that Amazon plans to try its hand at providing healthcare services in the brick-and-mortar world by buying One Medical, CVS announced that it, too is taking another run at expanding its own menu of healthcare offerings. The company says it’s looking at possible primary care acquisition targets, with an eye toward buying them outright or simply taking …

Dollar General Aims to Supply Healthcare to the Underserved. Drugstore Clinics Should Take Note Dollar General has seen a lot of succes swhere many retailers couldn’t be bothered—by offering low prices with sometimes minimal selection to customers who may not have many other options. It’s worked, though, with some of their stores evolving to offer the only access to fresh fruits and vegetables for miles around when mom-and-pop grocery stores in rural communities close up …

A new mode of delivering certain drugstore goods is literally ready to take flight in the communities of Frisco and Little Elm, TX, as Walgreens is taking a flyer on drone service from Wing, a subsidiary of Google. There’s no doubt the initiative scores a lot of points as a novelty and on the convenience scale—the company claims items can be delivered within 10 minutes—but there are significant drawbacks. For one thing, only around 100 …