News Release
Retail Clinics May Increase Medical Spending, Rather Than Trimming Costs
Mar 7, 2016
Retail clinics may be creating new demand that increases the cost of health care rather than reducing medical spending.
Published in: Health Affairs, v. 35, no. 3, Mar. 2016, p. 449-455
Posted on RAND.org on March 14, 2016
This article was published outside of RAND. The full text of the article can be found at the link above.
Retail clinics have been viewed by policy makers and insurers as a mechanism to decrease health care spending, by substituting less expensive clinic visits for more expensive emergency department or physician office visits. However, retail clinics may actually increase spending if they drive new health care utilization. To assess whether retail clinic visits represent new utilization or a substitute for more expensive care, we used insurance claims data from Aetna for the period 2010-12 to track utilization and spending for eleven low-acuity conditions. We found that 58 percent of retail clinic visits for low-acuity conditions represented new utilization and that retail clinic use was associated with a modest increase in spending, of $14 per person per year. These findings do not support the idea that retail clinics decrease health care spending.
Further research should investigate how retail clinics affect the coordination of care, care for chronic illnesses, and overall spending.
This article was published outside of RAND. The full text of the article can be found at the link above.
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