Quick fix

You’re dashing around, getting ready for work, packing lunches and tidying up, when your preschooler wakes up cranky.

Her left eye is crusted shut and when she opens it, you see that it’s bright red.

Pinkeye.

So much for the day’s plans.

You call the pediatrician, but you can’t get an appointment until 4 p.m. No day care today, and no work for you.

A new type of clinic, though, hopes to make it more convenient to deal with those day-to-day illnesses.

They’re called convenient care clinics and they’re exploding across the country, offering consumers a speedy and relatively cheap way to be treated for minor ailments.

“It’s going to be part of the future of health care,” says Jay Molitor, who opened Spokane’s first such clinic, RapidClinic, earlier this month inside the University City Rosauers in Spokane Valley.

Don’t confuse these clinics with urgent-care centers, which are already scattered around the area. These walk-in clinics are not for emergencies or serious conditions. In most cases, they are staffed by nurse practitioners or physicians’ assistants who generally treat sore throats, coughs, bladder infections and about two dozen other basic conditions. Some locations offer sports physicals and immunizations.

At the area’s only other such clinic, QuickHealth of North Idaho in Hayden, women also can be seen for a pelvic exam and Pap smear in addition to the other common illnesses, says Katie Nelson, a nurse practitioner who owns the clinic with her husband, Brad.

Some clinics are located in existing retail spaces, near pharmacies. Others are stand-alone centers. Some accept insurance reimbursement and others take only cash. (Spokane’s RapidClinic accepts insurance and charges $59.95 for a standard visit. QuickHealth does not accept insurance and charges $39 per office visit, with additional charges for tests and other services.)

The first convenient-care clinic opened in Minneapolis in 2000 and about 350 are currently in operation around the country. That number, though, will likely double by December and will double again the following year, says Tine Hansen-Turton, executive director of the Philadelphia-based Convenient Care Association.

There’s even a new niche publication, Retail Clinician, devoted to the industry.

Wal-Mart, Target, Walgreens and CVS are all either operating clinics in select stores or planning to open them in the near future. Wal-Mart expects to open 2,000 such locations in the next five to seven years, the Wall Street Journal reports.

“In the last eight months to a year, it’s really taken off,” Hansen-Turton says. “I think it says we need more accessible, affordable health care. It really tells us a lot about the fact that we still have a hard time providing access to care for patients.”

The movement does have its detractors, though, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

A 2005 AMA editorial said, “Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with making health care more convenient and available to patients. But a quick visit to a store-based clinic is no substitute for regular care from a physician. Health care isn’t just about convenience; it’s about quality as well.”

And the pediatrics group says it “opposes retail-based clinics as an appropriate source of medical care for infants, children and adolescents and strongly discourages their use, because the AAP is committed to the medical home model.”

But Molitor and others who run these quick-stop clinics are quick to point out that they are not primary-care providers.

“We have no intent of being a health-care home,” he says.

Nelson says she regularly refers people to area doctors for further treatment, and Molitor, whose clinic has only seen a handful of patients so far, says he plans on doing the same.

The Convenient Care Association adopted industry standards in March, and Hansen-Turton says patient satisfaction remains high.

“Consumers are saying they like the transparency,” she says. “Health care is not transparent. We don’t really know what we’re buying. It takes the mystery out of, ‘What does health care cost?’ “

Both Molitor and Nelson would like to open more convenient care clinics in the area in the future.

“The growth is just phenomenal,” Molitor says. “This is a very important part of the (health-care) puzzle. Are we going to solve the problems? No.”