Retail Clinic – A Safe and Cheap Health Care Option

It is 7pm on a Wednesday evening, and you have a sore throat.  It feels the same as some that you’ve had in the past, the type that are cured as soon as you got a certain prescription.  You want to begin treating it, but all that stands in your way is someone who can write a prescription.  What do you do?  Go to the ER?  Urgent care?  Wait until the morning and try to see your doctor?  Consider a retail clinic.

While several healthcare market forces have evolved lately which are favorable for savvy consumers – reductions generic drug prices and health savings accounts to name a couple — one has expanded at an impressive clip in the past couple years and could routinely save anyone money on healthcare – the build-out of retail healthcare, also known as walk-in or convenient-care clinics (not to be confused with urgent care clinics, which are significantly more expensive.)

Retail clinics come in a few forms.  Some are run by for-profit companies and go by names such as MinuteClinic, RediClinic, TakeCare, or The Little Clinic.  Others are being offered by regional healthcare systems as another option on the continuum.  They can be found in strip malls, inside big box retailers or drug stores, and even on larger employer campuses, and they can save you big bucks on routine healthcare.  While those living in urban or suburban areas will have more choices when it comes to retail clinics, the advent of more clinics inside Target or Wal-Mart stores may spread the trend to more rural areas.

There are two compelling advantages of retail healthcare:  Cost and convenience.  On the cost front, a retail clinic will charge you roughly half of what you would spend at the doctor’s office or 1/5 of what you might pay at an ER.  They can do this because they are staffed with physician assistants (PAs) instead of the typical hierarchy of doctors, nurses and staff.  You’ll also notice that they have minimalist setting, with no expensive equipment.  The result is a saving that is passed along to you.  To use a specific example, an earache at a retail clinic will likely be diagnosed for around $60, while at your doctor’s office it would cost around $100, and the cost at an urgent care or emergency room would be anywhere from $150 to $200 or more.  If you are uninsured or have a high deductible, this can really save a bundle.  More price examples and links to retail clinics can be found here.

The second advantage is convenience.  No appointments are necessary at retail clinics, which means you may be seen within minutes of arriving.  They are usually open later than a doctor’s office, are usually open on weekends, and are often situated within feet of a pharmacy counter, making the process for filling a prescription simple.

Are there downsides?  For the most routine of care, it is hard to find any.  However, there may be cases when you might be better off seeking a higher level of care.  First, if you have a condition that you think will need a physician evaluation or tests requiring more sophisticated equipment, you may be better off going straight to your doctor or an urgent care.  In that case, there is a good chance that you’ll end up going there anyway, and the retail clinic would simply be a temporary measure.  Second, most retail clinics are not linked up with your provider’s medical record.  In order to have a complete recorded health history, you’ll want to let your doctor know about your illness and how it was treated the next time you see him or her.  Sometimes the smaller visits which seem inconsequential can be part of a pattern, only identified when reviewing a complete medical history.

For those without insurance or with high-deductible plans, retail clinics are probably the best-priced care you will find for routine needs.  For those with insurance, many plans will now waive the copay for using retail clinics because it saves them so much money.  A few still consider it an out-of-network event, resulting in you paying the full bill, but those instances are decreasing as insurers figure out how great a deal this is for them.

Overall, it appears that retail health is here to stay, and all indications are that it is a welcome development for the savvy healthcare consumer.

This is a guest post from Paul, who operates a health care consumerism website, Health Harbor.  He brings 15 years of health care industry experience to the site, and try to offer some “insider” information on the system so people can be better consumers of health care.

Tagged as: Better Yourself, Money Tips

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