Our Blog

Retail Healthcare - Saving the Healthcare Industry

Twenty years ago most physicians would have recoiled at the notion of integrating their existing practice with a retail operation, but the current reimbursement-based system is so thoroughly inefficient that retail has become an industry salvation.

Just as Wal-Mart has brought retail to the healthcare industry, modern hospitals, clinics and medical practices are bringing healthcare into the retail business. Hospitals once relied almost exclusively on immediate need for their patient base, but that's no longer true: those patients relying on hospitals almost exclusively for acute care have become consumers, hungry for information, services and products, and hospitals that decline to provide what consumers want will invariably lose business to more accommodating wellness purveyors.

It's a free market economy, an economic wild west, and only the fit, the institutions that adapt to the economic realities, will survive.

Retail success is built around providing people with attractive options; discounted generic prescriptions at Wal-Mart will test the conventional pharmacy model, but hospitals with branded vitamins and healthcare products will similarly test the conventional retailers. Unlike the conventional healthcare system, retail-based, wellness-oriented healthcare is economically sound, and growing at an astonishing pace.

More choices for the consumer mean healthier, happier customers, and healthcare providers who can economically prosper rather than barely stay afloat fulfill their mission of serving both individuals and the community as a whole. The definition of a good business arrangement is one in which all parties benefit. This is the goal of Healthcare Retail: to provide more productive business practices for all healthcare providers and to create more and better healthcare options for consumers.

This revolution in the healthcare isn't some futuristic projection: it's happening now in healthcare facilities all across the United States.