News Release
Use of Retail Medical Clinics Continues to Grow; Older Patients and Preventive Services on Rise
Aug 15, 2012
Published In: Health Affairs, v.31, no. 9, Sep. 2012, p. 2123-2129
Posted on RAND.org on September 01, 2012
Retail clinics have rapidly become a fixture of the US health care delivery landscape. We studied visits to retail clinics and found that they increased fourfold from 2007 to 2009, with an estimated 5.97 million retail clinic visits in 2009 alone. Compared with retail clinic patients in 2000-06, patients in 2007-09 were more likely to be age sixty-five or older (14.7 percent versus 7.5 percent). Preventive care—in particular, the influenza vaccine—was a larger component of care for patients at retail clinics in 2007-09, compared to patients in 2000–06 (47.5 percent versus 21.8 percent). Across all retail clinic visits, 44.4 percent in 2007–09 were on the weekend or during weekday hours when physician offices are typically closed. The rapid growth of retail clinics makes it clear that they are meeting a patient need. Convenience and after-hours accessibility are possible drivers of this growth. However, retail clinics make up a small share of overall visits in the outpatient setting, which include 117 million visits to emergency departments and 577 million visits to physician offices annually.
This report is part of the RAND Corporation External publication series. Many RAND studies are published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, as chapters in commercial books, or as documents published by other organizations.
The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.