New business model in Toronto: medical clinic and pharmacy under one rooftop
Source：City News
From：Taiwan Trade Center Toronto
Update Time：2020/09/17
Shoppers Drug Mart, the largest retail pharmacy chain in Canada has been expanding beyond traditional retail and core pharmacy offerings to provide a number of other health-care options to customers. One new initiative from Shoppers is opening medical clinics in Toronto where five family physicians will be available to take on a roster of patients for family medicine, primary care gynecology and sexually transmitted infection testing, and will accept appointments for walk-in services going forward. The first pilot clinic opened in Toronto’s midtown and two more are planned for the Greater Toronto Area over the next year, including one in the downtown core.
The brick and mortar clinic in Toronto came on the heels of Shoppers’s in-store telehealth service launched last month in British Columbia. Patients using the B.C. service receive an examination by a doctor – by way of a video call on a website called Maple – but can also use in-store tools such as rapid strep tests. Theresa Firestone, senior vice president of health and wellness at Shoppers explains that this new business model allows Shoppers to help doctors as managing clinics is not an area of expertise or interest for most of them. By removing the administrative burden from the doctors, they could spend all of their practising time dealing directly with patients. This service was seen as helpful during COVID-19 where Shoppers was able to help their physicians to conduct virtual care in the clinic when many physicians were not set up to do so. Besides, as pharmacists’ ability to access patients and prescribe varies in different provinces, introducing clinic into a pharmacy store may help improve pharmacists’ access to patients and patients’ access to prescribed drugs. If the foray into clinic management – as opposed to just clinics as tenants – is successful, Shoppers hopes to expand the validated and reined model to other parts of Canada.
In addition to the new medical clinics, other initiatives from Shoppers include licensing or owning 47 “Simply Pharmacy” medical clinic pharmacies and two standalone cosmetic dermatology clinics. Shoppers has also tested partnerships to offer online cognitive behavioural therapy programs, and nutrition consultations in some provinces. The innovative business models discussed here may ignite refined or new idea(s) that can be adopted into Taiwan’s medical industry.
Source：https://toronto.citynews.ca/2020/08/12/shoppers-drug-mart-to-test-3-medical-clinics-in-toronto-area-this-year/