›› At the end of Aisle 9, just past the canned soup, just beyond the check-out lane and next to the mechanical pony — still just a penny — are two examination rooms. The setting is odd, but everything else about the clinic feels like a doctor’s office — eye charts on the wall, tongue depressors in long, glass jars and a tall exam table with shiny vinyl padding.
The southeast Aurora Little Clinic is one of more than a dozen inside area King Soopers stores — part of a growing number of small, neighborhood health-care facilities located in easy-to-reach locales. Walmart, Safeway, Walgreens and other retailers are also getting in on the action, adding nurse practitioners to their staffs and seizing on one of the economy’s few growth sectors since the recession —
health care.
The trend toward smaller, convenient, more local health-care delivery has been ramping up for more than a decade. The idea is to take some basic medical procedures — a sports physical, flu shots, strep-throat and flu diagnoses, pregnancy tests or childhood vaccines — out of hospitals and doctors’ offices and bring them to where the patients are. That means tapping the thousands of neighborhood grocery stores, pharmacies and big-box stores that populate every neighborhood in the country.
A RAND health study in February said that since the first retail clinics popped up in 2000, about 1,200 more have moved into retailers. Visits to the clinics make up only a small portion of overall outpatient medical visits, but the number is steadily climbing. From 2007 to 2009, visits quadrupled to almost 6 million across the country.
King Soopers’ parent company, grocery giant Kroger Inc., has hundreds of clinics across the nation. David Kleberger, regional clinical director for The Little Clinic, said the facilities are a natural extension for the chain, stemming from a health focus that started with pharmacies and led to other efforts centered on healthy eating. All of it, he said, is connected to health care, so it wasn’t particularly jarring for the grocery store to add what is essentially a doctor’s office to the front of the store.
But the goal isn’t to replace a patient’s regular physician. If patients have serious medical issues, like chest pains or a broken bone, they need a traditional doctor or hospital visit. Minor medical woes, though? The neighborhood clinic can treat those seven days a week, without an appointment, and for about $85 in most cases. “We’re not trying to pull people away from their regular doctor,” he said. “We’re trying to complement their care.”
For many patients, just getting in to see their regular doctor is a chore. Appointment calendars at physician offices are packed, so seeing a doctor at the early stages of influenza — when anti-viral drugs could knock the disease out in a hurry — is often impossible. That’s a niche neighborhood clinics are looking to fill.
Jim Cohn, a spokesman for Walgreens, said the pharmacy chain has added 370 Take Care Clinics to its stores since 2007, including about a dozen in metro Aurora. The company saw a need for basic health care outside the typical doctor’s hours, Cohn said, and with same-day appointment scheduling available online, as well as weekend and evening hours, the clinics fill that gap in health access.
The need for access will only grow, too. The population as a whole is aging, and as people live longer, they need more care. Plus, the Affordable Care Act will mean thousands of people who didn’t have health insurance will now have it. Combined, all of that means more pressure on doctor’s offices, making small clinics an attractive option.
“Access is really the key and, arguably, the greatest need in health care,” Cohn said.
Dr. Barbara Kelly, an associate professor at University of Colorado School of Medicine and a family physician, said she referred a friend to The Little Clinic because she knew he could get an appointment long before they would at his regular doctor.
Still, Kelly said, it’s important that patients keep a relationship with their regular doctor. Having a doctor who knows you, and sees you regularly, is key to maintaining good health, she said. Clinics can’t offer that traditional relationship. “They are not the place to go to regularly manage different diseases, but it’s an excellent place to go for what their services are,” she said.