Why Walmart, Walgreens, CVS retail health clinic experiment is struggling

Walgreens' VillageMD recorded a $6 billion loss, an example of just how difficult it has become to generate profits from a health-care model that retailers over the past decade bet would be a big win.

But the business experience in the retail health clinic space has largely disappointed. That's not a huge surprise to Timothy Hoff, professor of management healthcare systems at Northeastern University. Hoff has researched retail health clinics and how they deliver primary care and says that the margins can be thin to non-existent, and that the many other challenges have hindered their success. What was not too long ago viewed as the "2.

The retail clinics depend on volume selling. "If you can't pump through a lot of patients, it doesn't work," Hoff said. Staffing was also a struggle. "They ended up being more expensive to run than they thought, combined with a workforce shortage, they just didn't work." Staffing costs, meanwhile, slicing into already thin margins, meant that when Sanders worked at MinuteClinic, she did everything from checking people in, to billing and cleaning the clinic at the end of the day, and any support staff was undertrained, at best, she said. "That was the model to ensure they could do it so they didn't have to add staff.

"Primary health care is a low margin business," said Arielle Trzcinski, a principal analyst covering health care at research firm. Forrester. "Compared to what they see in traditional retail, health care is a fundamentally different business," Trzcinski said, citing the challenges of navigating insurance companies and administrative burdens that health care brings.

"Walmart ultimately thought they were solving an important issue," Trzcinski said, but she added that Walmart never really put its full marketing muscle behind the effort or created relationships with other employers to make a pathway into the clinic. "They set out to make health care more affordable and convenient for their customers. But to do that you need volume. ...

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