During the last two decades the health delivery system has been revolutionized. Many patients no longer visit the traditional medical facility system but choose to visit RMCs to receive limited medical care. The new phenomena are known as RMCs and are a new delivery service for health-care services. As far back as 1995, Newt Gingrich predicted that patients would “go to Canada or Wal-Mart.” For example, retail medical clinics appear in pharmacies, grocery stores, and big-box retailers like Wal-Mart, offering basic health care services. Furthermore, retail stores have joined in the health-care fray in an effort to increase sales in the retail stores either through increased pharmacy sales or as an increased traffic in other areas of the stores. By establishing the medical clinics in retails stores, it allows the patient to experience more efficiency with the delivery of medical services. For example, when I have cold or flu symptoms, I make a quick trip to the retail clinic and see the Nurse Practitioner within fifteen minutes rather than spending hour visiting the traditional clinic in the Houston Medical Center. Patients could spend an hour or two in visiting the traditional doctor while a trip to the retail medical clinic could spend as little as fifteen minutes waiting for their appointment. Additionally, during the time that the patient is visiting the retail medical clinic, the one could shop for other items within the store such as groceries or soft goods thus increasing the efficiency of medical visits. In some cases, the retail centers are even providing an electronic device to notify the patient when the medical representative is available to see the patient.
Facts:
Ready Clinic (“The Company”) will create a...
... middle of paper ...
...f the anti-kickback statute. First, a requestor may not use a hypothetical situation as the basis of their advisory opinion; therefore, Ready Care must indicate that the coupon practice will be a practice that they seek to put in place.
Seeking an advisory opinion should be used judiciously, as the process is quite lengthy and may be very expensive due to the legal costs. The company’s operations could be exposed to more scrutiny by their request for a ruling. Furthermore, a ruling should not be sought where the law is unambiguous. In the case of the coupon, the law does not appear to be ambiguous. Additionally, although the OIG has stated that the fact that an advisory opinion does not qualify for a safe harbor or receive a favorable treatment by the OIG, a negative ruling does not indicate that the anti-kickback statute has been violated.
The substitutes is another big issue for Walgreens. The supermarket like Walmart has been going into drugstore business. As a supermarket, their products and services are wider, and they can provide the lower price due to bigger supplier and distribution network (Baeb, 2001). Currently, Walgreens has been fighting with specific medical services that has been mentioned in value chain section; prevention & wellness, treatment, and monitoring & management. To reduce the threat of substitutes, Walgreens would rather emphasize its business-level strategy. Also, it is better for Walgreens to have functional-level strategy to support its business-level strategy as well. The emphasized strategy from Porter 's generic strategies has been discussed later in this
Mr. Walgreen knew if he was going to be successful in the pharmacy business, he had to learn as much as he could from other pharmacists. Mr. Walgreen worked a series of jobs with the top leading pharmacists named Samuel Rosenfeld, Max Grieben, William G. Valentine, and Isaac W. Blood. However, Mr. Walgreen found that these pharmacists were teaching him old fashioned complacent methods of running a drugstore. He asked himself, “where was the selection of goods that customers really wanted and what about the customer service?” Mr. Walgreen c...
However prior to the modern understanding of Consumer Rights there was a understanding of Caveat Emptor – Buyer Beware –this has been a fundamental premise of consumer wellbeing prior to World War ‖ , relation to transactions, principle that the buyer purchases at his own risk in the absence of an express warranty in the contract . This common law rule assumes that buyers and sellers are in an equal bargaining position. However there has been evident change in consumer rights which have contributed to the precedence of using Caveat Emptor is no longer acceptable, apparent in the case ACCC v Hewlett Packard Australia (HP), illustrated that no longer can a company ...
The PCMH model promotes doctor-patient interaction and the personalized management of each patient by their primary care provider. The reimbursement system in particular sets this model apart from others. Physicians are reimbursed for the time spent with the patient in the clinic as well as for coordinating the patients’ health care team and communicating with the patient out of clinic. This means that, “doctors can be paid to send their patients a letter, or a link to a computer web site or a text message”.1 This will not only generate stronger patient-doctor bonds but also enable the patients to be more active in their health care plan. The model offers patients easier access to their health care team by providing more opportunities of communication outside the clinic in which they can receive medical counsel in a timely manner. This is made possible by the reimbursement system and its ability to compensate for out of clinic communications. The PCMH model therefore provides a preventive stance on medicine and ensures that the patient receives quality care on a regular
Davidson, Stephen M. Still Broken: Understanding the U.S. Health Care System. Stanford, CA: Stanford Business, 2010. Print.
Kovner, A.R & Knickman, J.R (2011) Jonas & Kovner’s Health Care Delivery in the United States, 10th Edition. New York: Springer Publishing.
Has anyone noticed that there seems to be a drugstore being built on every corner these days? Revco, Walgreens, and Rite Aid seem to be just a few of the drug store chains that are expanding. One has to wonder if this has anything to do with the possibility of including medicine under coverage by healthcare systems. This means that they may become part of a capitated payment system to the pharmaceutical providers. "By capitation, we mean a prospective payment to physicians or providers - either individually or as a group - of a fixed amount of money to care for each patient (Pearson, 1998)." In other words, every physician is provided a set sum of money whether they see any patients or not and every pharmacy would be given money whether they prescribe any drugs or not. Drug costs will rise.
Predictability means the assurance that their products and services will be the same over time and it all locales. For general out-patient clinics, nurses will ask some st...
The Federal Anti-Kickback Statute is a criminal statute that prohibits any person or business entity from making or accepting payment of any type of compensation to increase referrals for health services that are reimbursable by the federally-funded health care program including Medicare and Medicaid. Since the anti-kickback statute is a criminal statute, violations of it are considered felonies, with criminal penalties of up to $25,000 in fines and fi...
Shi, L. & Singh, D. A. (2010). Delivering Health Care in America: A System Approach 5th ed. Baltimore, Maryland: Jones & Bartlet
According to Harry A. Sultz and Kristina M. Young, the authors of our textbook Health Care USA, medical care in the United States is a $2.5 Trillion industry (xvii). This industry is so large that “the U.S. health care system is the world’s eighth
Despite the established health care facilities in the United States, most citizens do not have access to proper medical care. We must appreciate from the very onset that a healthy and strong nation must have a proper health care system. Such a health system should be available and affordable to all. The cost of health services is high. In fact, the ...
reimbursement determinations. As a result, the camaraderie among physicians has developed into a more aggressive approach to impede competition (Shi & Singh, 2012). Little information is shared with patients in regards to procedures or disease control. The subjects are forced to rely on the internet for enlightenment on the scope of their illnesses (Shi & Singh, 2012). Furthermore, the U.S. health care system fails to provide adequate knowledge on billing strategies for operations and other medical practices. The cost in a free system is based on supply and demand and is known in advance of hospital admission (Shi & Singh, 2012). The need for new technology is another characteristic that is of interest when considering the health care system. Technology is often v...
Consider Medical coverage as an item that is bought. If the buyers consolidated into a particular group, there is a more negotiating force on cost than attempting to get the product independently. Health care service providers would be compelled to rebuild evaluating keeping in mind the end goal to make a profit. This is the manner by which the mingled frameworks work, with no loss of benefit or nature of administration. Indeed, in opposition to turn, combined system far exceeds our present system. The change to a high-esteem therapeutic services conveyance framework must originate from inside, with doctors and supplier associations leads the pack. Every partner in the Healthcare system has a part to play in enhancing the value of treatment. Patients, healthcare service, managers, and suppliers can precipitate the change, and all will advantage extraordinarily from doing as
Commonly throughout most countries of the world, citizens of the society at large establish the system for Emergency Medical Services. In the case that the public is not willing or capable of summoning such a service, the country often finds other emergency services, businesses, or the government and authorities who act to employ a system. In other parts of the world, the emergency medical service additionally takes on the role of transporting patients from one medical facility to an alternative one. This occurs with some frequency because once a patient is analyzed and provided care at the immediate hospital; it may be more appropriate for a variety of reasons the patient needs to move to another facility. As one can see, the relat...