Health reform, tech driving retail transformation

DENVER — By 2025, more general practice medicine will take place in a store than in a doctor’s office.

 

That’s just one prediction for healthcare retailing unveiled by retail consultant Bryan Gildenberg in a TSE seminar on “The New Shape of Retailing” Saturday. 

 

Gildenberg, chief knowledge officer for Kantar Retail, challenged industry leaders to stay nimble and broaden their strategic horizons as massive demographic changes, an aging and more fragmented population and dramatic advances in technology transform the health care and retail industries over the next 15 years.

 

These forces are reshaping both the delivery of care and the nature of retailing, Gildenberg said. And the health system’s search for cost efficiencies, improved patient outcomes and better access to care is lending urgency to that transformation.

 

“Outcomes-based payment is going to be the primary topic of conversation between doctors [and other health entities] over the next five years,” he predicted. What’s more, with the health system expected to face a shortage of 50,000 primary care physicians by 2020 — and hospitals struggling to spread the costs and risks of patient care — retail clinics are becoming an increasingly viable business model for retail pharmacies. “Clinics in stores are going to be a very big part of how hospitals” provide care and invest in future models of care for their patients posts-discharge, Gildenberg said.

 

“What role will pharmacies play in helping hospital networks manage value-based payment?” In large part, said Gildenberg, which will depend on how well pharmacies “quantify the economic value” of adherence programs and other health services, and in part on how effectively they evolve to serve the needs of both patients and payers.

 

“Anything that enables you to take a medical experience and bring it to [any location] is going to be an incredibly powerful tool,” Gildenberg said. Primary care, he added, is moving to a decentralized, “self-service” model as the shortage of primary doctors accelerates, health plans and payers seek new, lower-cost forms of front-line care, and patients themselves take a greater role in their own wellbeing. 

 

Given the increasingly fragmented consumer base and the challenges posed by online powerhouse retailers like Amazon, pharmacy chains also are going to have to become much better at targeting their stores neighborhood by neighborhood — and at presenting a clear, concise message to consumers about their own value as a shopping destination, Gildenberg said.