from the Chicago Fed
Retail clinics offer convenient, low-cost preventive health care and treatment for minor injury and illness. When a retail clinic opens, the rate of visits to the emergency room for these low-severity conditions declines for people who live in close proximity.
Every fall, as the days grow shorter and the air turns colder, another somber seasonal marker arrives the flu. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that in the winter of 2018 – 19, about 42 million people got sick from the flu, causing 647,000 hospitalizations and 61,000 deaths.1 These numbers would be lower if more adults heeded medical advice to obtain a flu shot, yet only about one-third of prime-aged adults do so.
Enter the retail clinic. Retail clinics arrived on the health care scene in the early 2000s as a convenient and affordable alternative to doctors’ offices, urgent care centers, and emergency rooms (ERs). Because they are usually in big box stores or pharmacies such as Walmart and CVS, retail clinics are conveniently located. And because they serve customers on a walk-in basis, they are convenient to access. Their services include basic primary care for minor illnesses and injuries, such as sore throats, bug bites, and minor burns, as well as preventive primary care, such as vaccines and diabetes glucose monitoring.
Providing these medical services – at convenient times and locations – may affect how many people end up in the ER for minor conditions. The ER is an expensive (and often inconvenient) place to access such treatment. Indeed, a recent study found that the prices in retail clinics are around 80% lower than ER prices for the same service.2 Retail clinics thus have the potential to not only expand medical services but to do so while saving money. But do they live up to this potential?
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Source
http://app.frbcommunications.org/e/er?s=1064 &lid=6841 &elqTrackId=F2860506062A5B61459341132C9A1029 &elq=a88abe7ccfaf427d8a5345d55bec2ed8 &elqaid=16322 &elqat=1
