If You Can’t Beat ’Em …

With a multitude of entrepreneurial companies opening retail care clinics by the handfuls, a growing number of traditional healthcare systems are entering the convenient care arena—both to ward off encroachment on their markets and to strengthen ties with the communities they serve. And along the way, many say they may have found the missing link in the continuum of care.

“We were the first to open in New Jersey, so you could say it was a defensive measure to create a competitive barrier,” says Donald Parker, president of AtlantiCare Health Services, the ambulatory care wing of southeastern New Jersey-based AtlantiCare. “We have about a 65 percent market share in our region, so that presents a unique challenge for an outside provider who has no reputation in the market.”

The Egg Harbor Township-based system is opening a network of convenient care clinics in ShopRite supermarkets across the region. Like many quick-access clinics that have opened in recent years, AtlantiCare’s HealthRite centers are staffed by nurse practitioners, open evening and weekend hours and designed to treat a number of relatively low-acuity conditions. Fees for treatment range from $55 to $89 and are listed on a menu of service options that patients receive when they come in for care. The system opened its first center in fall 2006 in Somers Point, N.J., and is on track to open four clinics by the end of 2007 and three more in 2008.

“There’s a halo effect to being in the stores and communicating with patients all the time,” says Parker, noting that the clinics not only serve patients in the stores, but also act as patient finders for the rest of the system, which includes the two-campus AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center, four urgent care centers and an affiliated physician network. “These give us immense exposure to the public, as each of the ShopRites we’re in see an average of 33,000 customers a week who are walking in front of our HealthRite clinics.”

Parker says the added exposure will be helpful because some of the HealthRite centers will be opened near the edge of AtlantiCare’s current service area to attract new patients. “We have four urgent care centers, and three are right on the fringe of our market—they’re patient finders, business developers, relationship builders,” he says. “These retail clinics become an even more reasonably priced business to get into because the cost of entry is about one-sixth that of an urgent care center.”

AtlantiCare is not the only system to jump into the quick-access business. One of the first provider organizations to enter the sector was Wisconsin’s 13-hospital Aurora Health Care, which opened its first QuickCare branded clinic in early 2004.

“When we first looked at the QuickCare concept, we were looking at patient visibility, accessibility and convenience for the consumers,” says Janet Teske, manager of Aurora QuickCare. “We started with our pharmacies to trial them because it was our own space, but now we’re looking at where else patients want us. We’ve ended up at some of the shopping malls, grocery stores, and now at Wal-Mart.”

By the end of 2006, Aurora’s QuickCare network included 17 clinics across southeastern Wisconsin. Plans were in the works for three to five more clinics during the first quarter of 2007. Staffing the clinics are 54 nurse practitioners, says Teske, an advanced practice nurse, herself.

“It’s been beneficial for us,” says Teske. “It’s almost the missing link between classic primary-care physician services and urgent care, and it’s saving costs for people overall.”

Tine Hansen-Turton, executive director of the newly formed Convenient Care Association in Philadelphia, has heard similar comments from other provider-based organizations. “It’s a good market for hospitals to get into because it’s a more limited scope, but then they have a system behind them that they can refer patients to if necessary,” she says.

Michael O’Neil, senior vice president and chief operating officer of Memorial Health System in South Bend, Ind., says the one-hospital system’s three MEDPOINT Express clinics have helped bring new patients into the network. “About 30 percent of the people coming in are not connected to a provider, and many require subsequent follow-up care,” he says. “We’re seeing a lot of our affiliated primary-care physicians get a number of referrals from these operations.”

With nearly 18 months of experience running the retail clinics, O’Neil says Memorial is now focused on taking the concept to another level—opening clinics in other markets through partnerships with local providers. The first three clinics to open outside the South Bend market will be in Indianapolis through a partnership with Community Hospitals of Indianapolis, and O’Neil says discussions are under way with additional health systems in other markets.

“We’ve developed a model that we believe in, and that model is based on the connection with a local health system to ensure the quality and continuity of care,” he says. “From a strategic perspective, this is a line extension and it’s the right thing to do.”

Brad Cain is editor of California Healthfax and associate editor with HealthLeaders magazine. He may be reached at bcain@healthleadersmedia.com.