RediClinic buy opens new front in RAD’s retail healthcare strategy

How serious are Rite Aid’s leaders when they proclaim their determination to make the company a full-service, full-spectrum retail healthcare provider? Serious enough to buy RediClinic — which has operated walk-in healthcare clinics in roughly 30 H-E-B stores in Texas for much of the past decade — and serious enough to embark on an aggressive growth campaign that includes the clinic healthcare provider as a new Rite Aid subsidiary.

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Following its purchase of RediClinic in April 2014, Rite Aid quickly signaled just how important an in-store clinic offering will be to its strategy as a broad-based retail healthcare company.



In February 2015, the company unveiled its first 24 RediClinics in Rite Aid stores in the Philadelphia and Baltimore/Washington, D.C. markets in a massive grand-opening blitz.



More recently, on May 6, Rite Aid announced a joint venture between RediClinic and MultiCare Health System, a leading not-for-profit health organization in the Pacific Northwest, under which the two firms will collaborate to operate 11 RediClinics inside local Rite Aid pharmacies in the greater Seattle area. The clinics will be staffed by board-certified MultiCare nurse practitioners. The new walk-in centers will treat patients for more than 30 common medical conditions.



More growth is coming. “We plan to open a total of 50 clinics in fiscal 2016, including additional locations in Texas, where RediClinic already is a leading provider of convenient healthcare clinical services,” said Rite Aid President and COO Ken Martindale. “This would bring our total number of operating clinics to over 100.”



Since 2005, more than 1.7 million patients have been treated at a RediClinic. According to Chairman and CEO John Standley, retail clinics “play a critical role in today’s healthcare delivery system and will play an important role in Rite Aid’s overall health and wellness strategy.”



Robert Thompson, EVP of pharmacy, called RediClinic “yet another additional capability we can bring to the communities we serve, which will improve access to health care, wellness solutions and help lower overall healthcare costs.”