Having Found Primary Care Avenues Too Crowded, Retailers May Be Retreating to Home Care

Retail chains like CVS and Walgreens have plopped down billions of dollars to try to capture a piece of the primary care marketplace. It hasn’t gone well. So, as noted in a new article published by Home Health Care News, they’re trying a different, less competitive approach: home care. In the case of CVS Health, that meant again digging deep to buy an established enterprise, specifically Signify Health. And they’re open to buying more such businesses, according to the article, in the hope that home care will work synergistically with their established drugstore business and less solid primary care locations. JUCM has been covering the retail drug industry’s struggles for relevance in primary care for years, most recently in an article published in our June issue. If you don’t have your hard copy handy, you can read ‘Big Retail’ Pivots Are a Retreat from ‘On Demand’ Care online right now.