Providing Affordable, Accessible Non-Emergency Health Care
In-store health care clinics are small health care facilities located in high-traffic retail outlets. At in-store clinics, highly trained experts such as physician assistants and nurse practitioners who are licensed in many states to dispense basic medications, administer vaccines and treat common non-emergency illnesses and ailments such as influenza and sprains. In-store clinics provide many advantages for both individuals and the health care system itself. They:
· Provide affordable and accessible, non-emergency health care to consumers who otherwise may have to wait for appointments with a traditional primary care physician or provider.
· Reduce emergency room visits and improve primary care access for many patients without health insurance.
· Provide convenient, one-stop shopping for patients. Because most clinics are located inside a retail store or a pharmacy, patients can fill needed prescriptions easily and begin treatment for their diagnosis without delay.
· Offer standard electronic medical records for their clinic patients, helping eliminate the need for paper records and improving patient outcomes while further reducing costs.
· Provide an easy, affordable option for frontline patient care. They decrease barriers to care sometimes created by long appointment wait and visit times at physicians’ offices.
· Reduce the need for specialized, expensive equipment because clinics offer standard care for common ailments. Less specialized equipment means lower costs.
· Streamline costs and pass savings along to patients.
As the retail clinic business grows and more people seek the convenience of high quality, inexpensive care offered by these clinics, family practitioners and other medical doctors – who are already in short supply, particularly in rural areas—are free to focus their time on more complicated cases.
Policy considerations
If a public health plan is crafted, retailers urge Congress to allow patients to visit in-store clinics to treat basic conditions. Lowering or waiving co-pays will further encourage individuals to seek basic medical services from clinics instead of emergency rooms.
RILA supports:
· Laws allowing general business corporations to provide medical services to streamline the operations of in-store health clinics. We believe that it is the quality of the practitioner that matters, not who owns the store.
· Expanding the scope of services and prescribing authority of nurse practitioners and physician assistants.
· The efforts of some insurers that have lowered, and even waived entirely, co-payments for insured individuals who seek care from a retail clinic instead of a doctor’s office. We will oppose medical association efforts to prohibit such insurance savings incentives.