Got a Headache? Take It Up With Walgreens

Walgreens healthcare system may be on to something

By KRISTIN NEHLS

Updated 1:18 PM CST, Tue, Jul 28, 2009

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We’ve all done it. We tell our boss we need a day off to see a doctor, when in fact we’re going to the beach or a baseball game.

Well, a trip to the doctor may not be a valid excuse to play hooky much longer. Thanks (or should we say no thanks) to Walgreens.

The Deerfield-based drugstore believes it’s already practicing the future of healthcare with its in-store, convenience-care clinics. The clinics have popped up around the country and have spread to workplace-based health centers, promising convenience, ease of access, transparent pricing and widespread availability.

Workplace-based health centers allow employees to see a doctor in the convenience of their company’s building.

"We want to keep our people here for as many hours as we can," a corporate services director at a major bank in New York said. "If an employee can come down to the clinic instead of taking a half-day off, we want them to do that. The clinic pays for itself, maybe even twice over."

And businesspeople aside, grandma has the convenience of getting herself checked out during a milk run to the local drugstore.

Walgreens bought Take Care Health Systems in 2007 from Hal Rosenbluth and Peter Miller, the two men who formed the convenience-care clinic healthcare system.

Rosenbluth is now the president of the Walgreens Health and Wellness division, and wants to expand the clinics’ coverage beyond the acute episodic care that’s currently offered.

“It’s moving to full primary care,” Rosenbluth said. “We’re mimicking what’s in the corporate clinics.” Rosenbluth hopes the clinics are one day profitable as stand-alone businesses."

Up next? The launch of a pilot program to offer diabetes care.

With nurse practitioner visits costing between $59 and $74, these clinics are popular even with companies as big as Disney. And when a healthcare clinic inside a drugstore becomes popular, well, the drugstore itself reaps the benefit of those popularity points as well.

“What ends up happening is people become more loyal to Walgreens," CFO Wade Miquelon said.

Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner.

But we’ve got to be proud of Walgreens. As a company whose seeds were planted in the Chicago-area, their bloom has spread and succeeded in full force.