From the Washington Post:
Walk-in medical clinics run by CVS, Wal-Mart and other retailers provide care for routine illnesses that is as good as, and costs less than, similar care offered in doctors’ offices, hospital emergency rooms and urgent care centers, according to a new Rand Corp. study. The cost savings over emergency rooms, in particular, was quite dramatic.
…
“A lot of rhetoric in the health-care reform debate has been about improving value in the delivery of health care,” said Ateev Mehrotra, a University of Pittsburgh physician who was the study’s lead author. “These clinics are a new way of delivering care that fit the definition of improving delivery of health care” by keeping costs down and providing comparable quality.
The study, was published this month in the Annals of Internal Medicine. An abstract is available at http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/abstract/151/5/321. Annals also published a related study reporting that one-third of Americans live within a 10-minute drive of such a facility. In the Washington area, the biggest operator of walk-in clinics is CVS (MinuteClinic).
“Located in retail stores, such as pharmacy, discount or grocery chains, these clinics require no appointments, are open on weekends and evenings, report little waiting time, and offer services limited to immunizations and treatment of minor acute conditions,” according to the comparative study. It also said the clinics, which are usually staffed by nurse practitioners and physician assistants rather than doctors, tend to “serve a population that is younger, more likely to be uninsured, and less likely to have a primary care physician.”
(via Galen.org)
