The Challenge and Promise of Retail Medicine

摘要

The articles by Scott A. Mason, DPA, FACHE, and Denise B. Prince and Thomas Graf raise important issues involving the challenges and promise of extending healthcare through retail medicine. They point to the benefits, such as providing care in places convenient for the consumer, greater scalability, a pleasant environment with less environmental harm, increased transparency, and standardization. They also point to a number of challenges, such as pressure to generate commercial-level revenues, an expectation that nearby businesses will benefit economically by drawing in more customers, pressure to increase the number of prescriptions filled at the local pharmacy, and competition for the vaccination business. Prince and Graf report that some large national retail chains now seek to own the healthcare systems rather than contract with them because they lack interoperability among their health information technology systems (Riskin, Koppel, and Riskin 2014).