Marketplace

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 …

Zoom+Care has carved out an identity for itself as a tech-savvy provider of urgent care services on a regional level in the Pacific Northwest. According to a report posted on Geekwire.com, however, the company says it’s going to devote more energy into offering virtual medicine services—to the extent that they think they reach nearly 8 million more patients in Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. There are also plans to open additional brick-and-mortar facilities in both …

There have been murmurs about operators launching behavioral health urgent care centers for years now, but the movement has not really gotten a foothold. There are signs that could be changing, however. Sisters of St. Mary, a major health system in the St. Louis area, has opened one such facility at DePaul Hospital while Los Angeles County, CA is finishing up construction of its own Mental Health Urgent Care Center. Local media coverage of both …

Retailers have learned that just because something isn’t of interest to consumers 12 months a year doesn’t mean a venture can’t be highly lucrative. Think about the “pop-up” shops that appear seemingly out of nowhere every Halloween and winter holiday season. Carbon Health appears to be hoping that same strategy can work for urgent care, as the company announced the launch of 100 COVID-19 pop-up testing centers in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, …

JUCM News readers may recall that Walgreens established a partnership with VillageMD to open primary care clinics in connection with Walgreens locations around the country. The company is moving ahead in a big way now, announcing plans to open between 500 and 700 such clinics over the next 5 years. Besides putting pharmacists and primary care providers in the same location, Walgreens says it will also offer telehealth services and at-home visits under the partnership’s …