Walk-in retail clinics have potential to help uninsured, but… MedCity morning read, May 27, 2009

Typical retail clinic

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania — Walk-in clinics in grocery or drug stores diagnose and treat common illnesses like strep throat and provide services like school physicals for modest, set prices.

So these clinics have the potential for helping the uninsured pay for routine medical care out of their own pockets.

Trouble is, few of these clinics are located in the poorest of neighborhoods, according to a report by Dr. Craig Pollack of the University of Pennsylvania.

Since 2000, more than 1,000 of these clinics have opened in U.S. stores like CVS, Walgreen, Walmart and Target, in addition to grocery stores. And like most businesses, retail clinics go to where the money is — the suburbs.

“There has been a rapid rise in the number of retail clinics across the United States, but this growth is not evenly distributed across communities,” Dr. Pollack, an internist and Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Penn. “Poorest neighborhoods are less likely to have access to these clinics.”

Working with Dr. Katrina Armstrong, Pollack found that census tracts with more retail clinics had lower populations of black residents, lower poverty rates and higher median incomes than census tracts without retail clinics.

“Many people have promoted retail clinics as a cure for access to care for the underserved,” said Dr. Mehrotra, a University of Pittsburgh doctor who studies retail clinics but had nothing to do with the Pollack study, according to an Associated Press story that was published in the Washington Post.

“These findings show that’s unlikely to happen,” Mehrotra said.

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