Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Retail Health Clinics Aren’t Dead Yet

As more retailers lose their enthusiasm for primary care and urgent care services, traditional provider organizations still are in no position to ignore the market share that retailers may potentially gain. Kaufman Hall’s recent newsletter notes: “If these retailers want to find success in primary care, partnering with traditional providers could be a beneficial opportunity for all parties.” With retail clinics as a convenient front door, health systems and payers with provider assets could leverage …

Suit Claims CVS Revealed HIV Status of 6,000 Patients in Ohio

CVS Health is one of the defendants in a federal lawsuit claiming that it and other companies failed to protect the HIV status of 6,000 patients in Ohio—not through an online data breach, but thanks to a poorly constructed envelope. The suit filed by three unidentified plaintiffs maintains that when CVS mailed letters to patients in the state’s HIV drug assistance program last year, the recipients’ HIV status was visible in the envelope’s glassine window. …

Proposed Hospital Mergers Are Attributed to CVS, UnitedHealth Group Deals

It hasn’t been 2 weeks since the first of two healthcare megadeals was announced (CVS buying Aetna, followed closely by UnitedHealth Group announcing it was going to buy DaVita’s medical group), but they’re already being cited as the reason for consolidation in the hospital marketplace. Dignity Health in California and Colorado’s Catholic Health Initiative are expected to team up in a move that would have the combined system controlling some 700 care cites and 139 …

Will Plans to Start Rx Deliveries Affect CVS’s Retail Clinics Strategy?

Amazon’s apparent plans to get into the pharmaceutical distribution business—the online retailer has already gotten permits that would pave the way in several states—may have pushed CVS to announce plans to start delivering medications the same day they’re prescribed in certain cities, and next-day everywhere early in 2018. The irony is that CVS has sunk untold resources into its retail clinic business, based on drawing more customers into their brick-and-mortar locations. This begs the question …

CVS–Aetna Merger Would Have Implications for Urgent Care

Neither company has confirmed it, but The Wall Street Journal reports that CVS Health has offered to buy Aetna in a deal that could have vast implications in the retail health and insurance marketplaces. The combined company would have much stronger bargaining power when negotiating deals with health systems, payers, and pharmaceutical companies, than either company does alone. For starters, as the WSJ article points out, CVS’s pharmacy benefit management arm would see “a huge …

Is Retail the Place for Employee Drug Screens and Other Occ Med Testing?

MinuteClinic has made its name by giving customers shots and offering immediate care for low-acuity infections (ie, those for which prescriptions can be dispensed within the store). Now, however, it has announced a plan to partner with Alere eScreen to provide occupational medicine-type services for employers—most notably, including drug screens. The plan is to contract with companies who will send their workers to the CVS-operated clinics for biometric screenings, vaccinations, and Department of Transportation physicals, …