Tacoma
MultiCare Health System has reached an agreement with Rite Aid Corp. to build and staff clinics with certified nurse practitioners in Rite Aid drug stores in Tacoma and Lakewood.
MultiCare, a three-hospital system based in Tacoma, evidently is the first hospital in the state to venture into the retail market.
"I don’t know of any other hospital opening clinics in drug stores," said Cassie Sauer, public relations director with the Washington State Hospital Association.
Seattle-based Virginia Mason Medical Center, for instance, has made no step in this direction nor plans to. "We have looked at opening retail clinics but have chosen a different strategy," said Marnee Iseman, VM’s vice president, clinic operations. Virginia Mason, she said, aims to give its patients convenient and same-day access to their VM doctors.
MultiCare sees its retail clinics — branded "MultiCare Express Clinics" — as another entry point for patients into its system of hospitals and physicians. MultiCare Medical Group employs 86 doctors across 13 clinics, in the Tacoma area, South King County, Auburn and Kent.
If the Rite Aid clinics succeed, MultiCare says it figures to open more of them faxless payday loan fast cash advance.
MultiCare is making its move at a time when retail-based health clinics in this region are apparently not faring all that well, according to an account published May 26 in the Puget Sound Business Journal.
"The concept has proved much more popular in other parts of the country," the Business Journal reported.
MultiCare, though, believes it’s crafted a different and more workable approach to the market. What distinguishes its project is that MultiCare’s retail clinics will link "seamlessly" to the system’s physician group and hospitals, said Dr. Andrew Baron, Primary Care Medical Director for the MultiCare Medical Group.
"We have an integrated system," Baron said. If a patient needs a level of care higher than offered in the planned Rite Aid clinics, the certified nurse practitioners staffing them can refer patients to MultiCare’s hospital emergency rooms or to its physicians, all of which are linked by an electronic health-record system.