Roadblocks are being set up as retail clinics spread. Is the AMA winning the fight?
Instead of a waiting room, MinuteClinics provide chairs for customers outside the exam rooms. They also don’t have their own bathrooms, so patients who need to provide urine samples must use the regular CVS bathroom. Older MinuteClinics didn’t include a hand-washing station for nurse practitioners — they used a hand sanitizer instead — but sinks were added at the behest of regulators. “Patients have never had a problem with the design of our clinics,” says Michael C. Howe, founder and chief executive of MinuteClinic.Another issue is space. The current regulations in Massachusetts require that rooms where patients are treated include at least 80 square feet of floor space and an exam table. MinuteClinics have no exam table — patients are treated in chairs — and at most 54 square feet of floor space. In documents submitted to state health regulators, MinuteClinic argued that the space is sufficient for its “limited scope of services.” Regulations proposed yesterday by the state, and being considered by the Public Health Council, would allow the clinics to operate with as little as 50 square feet of floor space, no waiting room and no separate bathroom.
“You’re crowding people who may be sick, not to mention potentially exposing someone who’s just trying to buy Doritos,” says Bruce Auerbach, president-elect of the Massachusetts Medical Society and chief of emergency medicine at Sturdy Memorial Hospital in Attleboro, Mass.
Related posts:
- Physician-staffed retail clinics
- The retail clinic era is over, and why pharmacy-based clinics are doomed to fail
- Why doctors need to embrace retail clinics
- The AMA takes on retail clinics
- Retail clinics and disruptive innovation
- Are retail clinics living up to expectations?
- Should primary care doctors embrace retail clinics?
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The Massachusetts Medical Society? Apostates them all yet the public knows not. This is the same organization to which the following can be attributed:
The Massachusetts Medical Society opined in 1848 that physicians should be “looked upon by the mass of mankind with a veneration almost superstitious.”
Sorry, this group of self-serving national traitors should command no credibility except amongst the idolaters.
Oh, for goodness sake, you’re quoting something from almost 160 years ago. If any of those original people are still alive, they ought to be killed!
Given the war that pharmacists have waged on physician dispensing, only a small addition to doctors income for those who do it, as a conflict of interest, the pharmacies entering the medical care business has the be the most hypocritical action in the history of American commerce. In this case, the incentive to modify the prescribing to maximize pharmacy profits will be quite high, and the person’s doing the prescribing no independent professionals but employees of a giant corporation.
I think that’s fair.
Churches that sell dinners find that they must meet sanitary standards for their kitchen facilities.
Retail clinics doing “doctor” things should meet the same physical standards.
Interesting that the AMA appears to be grasping at straws trying to derail cheap accessible care for low acuity problems. If these same patients presented to an ER they would likely be seen by a NP or PA in the fast track area or frequently sitting in a chair in a busy hallway full of sick patients. Probably much less than 54 square feet of space and bathroom down the hall.
Anon 6:29
The organization should be banned for their imperialistic aggression and oppression of the populace. The current system is one that was put in place by the machinations of these national traitors. Their organization should continue to be vilified until the last vestiges of their crimes against humanity are corrected.
hmmm… I don’t know how to put this, but YOU SOUND Fing NUTS!
And you sound like an idolatrous national traitor. Perhaps one of those lost in their stuperous superstitious veneration…
Check out my post on this subject for another view:
http://healthwise-everythinghealth.blogspot.com/2007/08/minute-clinics-be-afraid-be-very-afraid.html
The NP or PA in the ER are working for a hospital whose primary source of profit is provision of care and whose clinical operations are under the control of doctors.
The NP or PA in the drug store are working for a business whose primary business is the sale of drugs and is under the control of MBA’s.
Any who can’t see the risks in the latter situation hasn’t been working in corporate America very long.
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