Retail Clinic Patients More Likely to Also Have a Regular Physician

Individuals who visited a retail clinic within the last year are more likely to have a regular physician than the general population, according to the latest survey by Kalorama Information.

The health care market researcher also found that individuals who went to a retail clinic in the past year were far more likely to have a physician that they saw in the last year than not.

The findings were based on a web survey of 2000 American adults who were selected based on average population demographics in the United States. In addition to the above findings, the survey revealed that those who have a regular physician are 54% more likely to visit a retail clinic than those who have not seen a physician within the last year.

“You could read this to mean there is a set of health care consumers that both physicians and retail clinics compete for,” Bruce Carlson, publisher of Kalorama Information, said in a press release. “Now, that might concern physician practices. Indeed, retail clinics have concerned medical groups since their origin. But we’ve also seen this statistic of high physician usage among retail clinic users over 4 years of doing these surveys.”

Based on the findings, Carlson believes retail clinics are creating health care visits or taking advantage of unfulfilled health care needs, rather than taking away from existing providers.

Additional findings from the survey showed that individuals with a regular physician are more likely to go more often to a clinic. Retail clinic visitors who do not have a regular physician were more likely to go once or twice, while visitors with a regular physician visited the retail clinic 3 times more.

Retail clinicvisitors who do not have a regular physician are likely to only visit the retail clinic once, maybe twice, per year.

Of the 2000 survey respondents, 866 answered that they had visited a retail clinic in the last 12 months.

Currently, there are more than 2200 retail clinics in the United States, with CVS and MinuteClinic largely dominating the market.