When Adrian Juncos of Springfield needed to get a rash on his arms checked out, he found himself weighing his options. Urgent care? A walk-in clinic? Then he remembered his dad mentioning a new clinic in the South Campbell Walmart.
On the clinic’s opening day, Juncos was among the first of dozens of area residents to seek care at Walmart’s first in-store clinic in Missouri.
“I had checked out a few other places, but this clinic was only 50 dollars for a visit,” Juncos says. “I just came and checked it out – I didn’t even know it was the first day.”
Nurse practitioner Kim McGinn-Perryman saw Juncos and wrote him a prescription, which he promptly filled at Walmart’s pharmacy.
“In 30 minutes, I was taken care of,” he says. “It was smooth and professional – it was a good experience.”
Since the clinic opened at the beginning of March, nurse practitioners have seen an average of 24 patients each day, more than the 17-18 organizers had expected. The clinic is drawing in a mix of patients, mainly for coughs, colds and respiratory and other minor infections.
Many of the patients seen at the clinic may be sick enough to need care, but not ill enough that they would pursue an urgent care or emergency department visit. A $50 stop at Walmart, though, is serving as an affordable entry point to health care – care many might otherwise postpone or avoid altogether.
“So far, the clinic has exceeded our expectations,” says Tom Luthy, administrative director of Regional Services. He says the patients he’s talked to are grateful for the retail clinic option, due in large part to the simplicity of the pricing.
“People know what they will be charged and they can plan for the cost of the visit.”
About 60 percent of patients are paying cash for their visits, while the remaining 40 percent are billing insurance. Luthy says plenty of the cash payers may be insured as well, but they may have high deductibles or other reasons for seeking care at the clinic.
“This is really the right time for this – it’s meeting a need we didn’t know was as big as it is,” says Luthy, who points out that more clinic locations will be announced soon, beginning with a location in Republic. “We’re seeing husbands and wives who have been laid off as well as those who might have no insurance or who can’t afford other options.
“It’s not the convenience, it’s the access and affordability that people really need.”
Danny Morris of Fordland came to the clinic on opening day after being referred by his primary care physician. He had caught a chest cold a month earlier and had been unable to shake it. Like Juncos, he was in and out of the clinic in a few minutes.
“It went really well, and this means a lot with me not having insurance,” Morris says. “Sometimes, I can’t go to the doctor any other way.”
Nurse practitioner Lorri Julian-Trotter says in her first day at the clinic, at least a third of the patients she treated were uninsured.
“A few were college students or young people who are working at jobs where they don’t provide insurance,” she says. “I think we’ll see a lot of younger people.”
Nurse practitioners say the clinic is a chance to work in a unique setting with quite a bit of autonomy.
“A retail clinic has some diversity to it,” McGinn-Perryman says. “It’s a good thing for the community and it’s a positive thing for the nurse practitioners – it’s a different sort of experience and I think they’ll enjoy that. It’ll change the way Cox utilizes nurse practitioners.”
Luthy says that in addition to expanding opportunities for nurse practitioners, the new retail clinics will become an established path of care that works alongside all the services offered by CoxHealth.
“The clinics aren’t competing with anything or replacing anything,” Luthy says. “We see these as offering a complementary service.”
Elise Jones, who manages the clinic and frequently works at the front desk, says she sees daily how the clinic is serving the community.
“We’ve had so many patients who might not have actually sought care because of insurance reasons,” she says. “Some people who might not have gone to a doctor to be seen are actually being seen and that’s exciting.
“We really are being there for those who need it, and that’s right there with the Cox mission.”
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