Walgreens Uses Walk-In Clinics
to Grow Its Brand
New CEO Greg Wasson, a former pharmacist, has found the prescription for customer care.
Kevin J. Miyazaki
Print
E-mailAnne Smith’s eight-year-old son has had a sore throat, headache and sporadic fever for several days. She thinks he should go to the doctor, but the cost, combined with her inability to take time off work to bring him, forces her to keep him home. Instead, after work, Smith takes him to Walgreens — not just for pain medicine, orange juice and throat lozenges but also for a visit to the in-store Take Care Clinic.
She signs in at an electronic kiosk, the kind airlines use for letting you get your own boarding pass. She types in her son’s name and date of birth and checks off his symptoms. A menu of prices for a medical consultation appears before she presses “continue,” so the bill yields no surprises. Ten minutes later, a nurse practitioner does a screening, and within 15 minutes, the boy is diagnosed with a sinus infection. A record of the visit is stored and a prescription is sent electronically to the patient’s choice of pharmacy — typically the one just steps away inside Walgreens. The Smiths pay $59 for the exam, $12 for a generic antibiotic, and they’re on the way home in under an hour.
These clinics may be the most convenient way to get medical care since the house call — only more affordable and available to anyone, with or without insurance, with or without a primary-care physician, says Greg Wasson, Walgreen Co. (WAG) president and CEO. He says thousands of scenarios like this have taken place every day since Walgreens rolled out its Take Care Clinics across the U.S. in 2007, when it acquired Take Care Health Systems, a company launched in 2004 by Hal Rosenbluth, now president of Walgreens’ Health and Wellness division. Walgreens, which now has more than 340 Take Care Clinics around the country, in 35 markets and 19 states, sees them not only as profit drivers, says Wasson, but also as a way to offer a complete package of health and wellness — plus pharmacy — services directly to its customers.
With 6,996 retail centers in all 50 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico — as well as an online store, mail-in prescription and specialty pharmacy services, home-health-care and health-care-plan administration — Walgreens generated $63.3 billion in fiscal 2009 sales, according to the company.
MORE ON WALGREENS
Building Green
Infused With Possibility
In My Own Words
Branching into health and wellness services is a marked shift in strategy for the drugstore chain that Charles R. Walgreen founded in 1901, in Chicago. Historically the company has been recognized for its intense focus on growing earnings through the expansion of its network of brick-and-mortar stores. This helped Walgreens achieve 34 consecutive years of record sales and earnings, a feat accomplished by only one other major U.S. corporation: Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT). From 2006 to 2008, Walgreens opened more than 500 new stores per year — or, as Wasson puts it, “A new Walgreens opened every 17 hours.”
The in-store clinics are top of mind for Wasson, especially now that health care is dominating social and political discussions. Wasson comes by his passion for pharmacies naturally: Two of his uncles owned small-town drugstores. The CEO, who interned at Walgreens while still in pharmacy school, managed stores for 12 years after he got out of school. His experience on the front lines of the retail chain informed his support for the Take Care Clinics as a way to make Walgreens a major player in the development of a “more comprehensive, less fragmented health-care system.”
Walgreens opened more than 500 stores per year — or, as Wasson puts it, “A new Walgreens opened every 17 hours.”
Because hospitals by law can’t turn away patients, many uninsured citizens use emergency rooms as de facto doctors’ offices, putting a massive financial strain on hospitals and the municipalities and taxpayers that fund them, Wasson explains. “Health care costs too much and doesn’t reach enough people,” he says. “Private-sector clinics like ours go a long way toward solving these complex health-care issues, even without a major change in government policy.” Wasson, who at 50 seems younger, thanks in part to a love of outdoor sports, sums it up in sportsmen’s terms: “Take Care Clinics hit the trifecta. They benefit the patient, they benefit the community, and they benefit Walgreens.”
The order of beneficiaries is telling. Although Wasson is intent on increasing shareholder value, his colleagues say that he still has the heart of a health-care professional who puts patient care at the top of his priorities. He’s known as a quiet, effective leader, a fierce proponent of promoting from within and a tireless advocate of community service. (Besides serving on the board of directors for the National Association of Chain Drug Stores and the Retail Industry Leaders Association, he is co-chair of 2009 Chicago fund-raisers for the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society.)
Wasson joined the company in 1980 as a pharmacy intern while a student at Purdue University; he managed several Houston drugstores before moving up the ranks in operations, becoming a regional vice president of store operations in 1999. He then held several executive positions at Walgreens Health Services, the company’s managed-care subsidiary that includes a pharmacy benefit manager (PBM), before being named executive vice president in 2005, then president in 2007. He took over as CEO in February 2009.
