Most patients seeking medical care don’t want to wait for long hours. Urgent Walk-in Clinics, with their long working hours and immediate walk-in appointments, fulfil that need which cannot be accomplished by a traditional visit to the doctor’s office/ hospital. The main reason for the popularity of walk-in clinics among patients is that they blend retail elements such as ground-floor locations that provide easier access and follow a customer-first approach oriented to service.
Timothy Hoff, a professor of management, healthcare systems, and health policy at Northeastern University along with Kathryn Prout, a pharmacy student at Northeastern recently researched to find out if these retail clinics were as effective as a visit to doctor’s clinic. Hoff and Prout reviewed all the academic literature on the efficacy, cost, outcomes of retail clinics, and patient satisfaction. Hoff’s and Prout’s findings were published in the medical journal Medical Care.
“People talk and write a lot about how great these retail clinics are, but we found that there were not a lot of studies that even looked at this issue, especially given how much the model is looked to for disrupting the primary care sector,” Hoff says.
According to Hoff’s research, the number of walk-in clinics in the United States nearly doubled between 2010 and 2018 and it is only projected to grow from there. Sources also claim that tech companies such as Amazon and Apple are experimenting with ways to get into the healthcare field through these retail walk-in clinics. Hoff suggests that retail walk-in clinics need much more rigorous, independent study, especially as their popularity among patients grows.
Hoff concludes by saying that retail clinics certainly have a role to play in providing basic care for a limited number of conditions for people who want a more convenient care. However, it’s not the same as going to your primary care physician.
Umayal