Dive Brief:
- In an effort to improve care coordination and collaboration, CVS/pharmacy has partnered with four major providers, including ProHealth Physicians of Farmington, CT, Texas Health Resources in Arlington, TX, Palmetto Health in Columbia, SC and the Baton Rouge Clinic in Louisiana.
- The partnership will allow patients to access care management and wellness programs at CVS' MinuteClinics in addition to the services they receive from big providers.
- To foster collaboration and care coordination, the providers will link up their EMRs with MinuteClinic's information systems, with the goal of supporting long-term wellness.
Dive Insight:
Providers have struggled to figure out how to relate to retail clinics since the upstart clinics first emerged on the scene several years ago. Some primary care practices chose to see them as competition and simply ignored them, while some health systems formed partnerships that brought doctors into the retail clinics to supervise care. But one of these relationships seemed to gel. While the retail clinics traditionally gave patients a visit summary whenever they were seen, in reality there was little coordination of care between the clinic and the patient's regular doctor.
These days, however, the relationship between retail clinics and traditional providers has evolved. Rather than competing with or ignoring the clinics, at least some providers have decided that they're better off seeing them as just another stop in the patient's journey to better health. With CVS reaching out to large providers, and integrating its retail clinics with provider EMRs, it seems likely that the pharmacy giant will be announcing similar relationships elsewhere in the country soon.