In-Store Health Clinics Turn Patients Into Customers
Excerpts taken from Shopping Centers Today, Sept. 2006

Health clinics are quickly turning up all over the United States, including in discount, grocery and big-box stores. These offer patients convenient, fast, and less expensive benefits to that of the traditional family doctor. In turn, this is generating a lot of opportunity not only for the healthcare industry, but for supporting retailers.

These chains, such as MedXpress, MinuteClinic, and CareNow, are serving patients with the kind of service needed for minor ailments that do not require the attention of a physician. Stores such as CVS, Walgreens, and Wal-Mart are having these clinics pop up inside their stores increasingly each year.

Most clinics are looking to open between 200 and 500 clinics in the next 3-5 years. "Aggressive as these expansion plans may seem, they are realistic," says Charles Wetzel, COO of Buxton, a customer-analytics and site selection firm based in Fort Worth, Texas that work with many urgent care center chains.

Retailers see the opportunity to produce more traffic and essentially to sell more products. Pharmacies have a huge opportunity with this upcoming trend, as this will provide one-stop convenience opportunities for care and medicine. "Retailers are signing multiple contracts with multiple vendors. Then they’ll see who’s most successfully banked and the most successful in executing," according to Wetzel.

"Convenience care clinics are not cost-prohibitive to put up, as most of them cost anywhere between $75,000 and $250,000." Construction usually takes up to a month and measure from 200 square feet to 600 square feet on average.

One would think that since everyone gets sick at one time or another, if you just put a location where there was a large density of people, it would be successful. But the situation actually depends on what types of patients live around the location. Different clinics appeal to different "customers" for different reasons. The clinics must first identify their target customer and then identify a location where there are high concentrations of their customer.

Advertising is another crucial part to the success of these clinics and is usually done through Internet and mailings. The mailings often go out with those of their host retailers, "that can drive traffic to the stores," Wetzel said.

There are approximately over 70 million Americans uninsured in the United States and this is an untapped market which will only continue to boom in the years to come. It is estimated there will be between 3,000 and 5,000 clinics overall in about 10 years.

For full article, go to:
www.icsc.org/srch/sct/sct0906/retail_health_clinics.php

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