Opinion

As summer fun winds down, families make preparations for return to school. For the retail clinician, summertime is back-to-school season. Sports physicals or pre-participation physical evaluation (i.e., PPE) represent an important service in the retail health setting and an important opportunity to impact the child’s health. The required PPE is one of the most common reasons teens seek primary care and may be the only time otherwise healthy teens seek care.

Happy summer! It was wonderful seeing so many of you in May in Las Vegas at the 6th annual Retail Clinician Education Congress. The event was a tremendous success, thanks to our colleagues at DSN Collaborative Care. We have already started the planning of 2014’s conference. We have received feedback from many of you about the conference and will be incorporating your suggestions into the format and layout of the conference next year. If you have ideas for us, please feel free to reach out to me any time.

I have been thinking about this column for a long time — the quintessential advice for how to work NACDS Total Store Expo next month. This morning I had one of those Hunter S. Thompson "eureka" moments.

In an infamous article Thompson once wrote about the 1970 Kentucky Derby, after several days covering the legendary race, and with no story and a notebook full of scribbles recounting random drunken moments of his trip, Thompson found the essence of his story in the image of his own blood-shot face in the bathroom mirror.

Have a colonoscopy performed in some parts of the United States, and it’ll cost you and your health plan as much as $9,000 or more, versus a few hundred dollars in most of the rest of the developed world — even with countries whose healthcare systems are on par with ours in terms of quality rankings and outcomes. The average hip replacement costs $40,364 here, compared with $7,731 in Spain. An MRI scan in the United States runs $1,121, vs. $319 in the Netherlands.

Why does the federal government want to block independent pharmacies from providing much-needed diabetes testing supplies to older homebound patients?

In a clear case of over zealous federal policy-making and glacial government response time, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said it will do just that beginning in July. That’s when CMS has decreed it will no longer allow small community pharmacies to deliver diabetic test kits to homebound and long-term care patients on Medicare.

As the editor of DSN, I decide what stays in print and what gets cut. Spatial limitations dictated that this snippet from our Amazon story had to go. But in the age of the omnichannel shopper, where every retailer competes against everyone else for a bigger share of the customer's wallet, how can you do an in-depth profile on the world's largest online retailer and not talk about omnichannel?

This month Walgreens announced that it would begin to offer chronic care services at its Take Care Clinics. Its biggest competitor, MinuteClinic, made a similar announcement about a year ago. With full implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the people paying the bills are going to get a good look at what retail clinics can do to lower costs and improve outcomes.