Dean Lin, CEO of Careworks Convenient Healthcare, has successfully built partnerships between retail clinics and health systems to offer affordable, top quality health care.
By Karen L. Wagner
Dean Lin has a vision. The CEO of CareWorks Convenient Healthcare, which currently operates five retail clinics in the north-central Pennsylvania area, envisions CareWorks clinics popping up all across the mid-Atlantic region within a few years, and perhaps one day, all across the country.
”There are a lot of interesting things that can be accomplished with these in-store medical clinics,” Lin says. CareWorks, operated by Geisinger Ventures, the business arm of Geisinger Health System, Danville, Penn., has an exclusive relationship with Weis Markets, a chain of Eastern U.S. grocery stores, which is CareWork’s landlord for the retail locations. According to Lin, CareWorks is the exclusive provider of convenient care for Weis Markets, a Fortune 1000 grocer with more than 150 stores in five states in the mid-Atlantic. ”Our relationship is a landlord-tenant relationship with retailer support for marketing,” Lin says.
After spending his career with integrated health systems—like Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare—Lin says the services retail clinics offer should fall within the continuity of care offered by a local health system, rather than independent operators. The Geisinger business model merges that importance of local healthcare delivery with Lin’s notion of retail clinics as a good business proposition. ”Early research shows that consumers are most comfortable receiving care from an in-store clinic if that clinic was linked to traditional health care,” Lin says. ”Aside from the consumer adoption benefits, I believe in-store clinics are optimal when they are fully integrated with a health system.”
Lin wants to grow the number of CareWorks clinics by partnering with other regional health systems. The idea is to combine CareWorks’ expertise in running the clinics with local resources that not only can build, promote, and oversee the clinics, but also manage operations such as building capital, identifying marketing channels, and overseeing physicians. The partnership model may include some level of economic gain sharing.
Through this model, CareWorks can help hospitals overcome some of the challenges associated with a new start-up venture, he says. ”[We’ll provide] them an easier way to scale this on a regional and national basis, if we need to.”
The business plan calls for quick, yet controlled growth by expanding slowly and building the brand. The current business model puts knowledge ahead of profits, at least for now, Lin says.
”We’re growing [the clinics] in a sustainable way, learning as much as we can after each clinic is built,” he says. ”We’re just trying to refine the model so that it makes sense for a broader scale rollout.”
Although competition likely will become more aggressive as the number of retail clinics grows, especially provider-run clinics, Lin says many clinics will eventually consolidate as some of the smaller, and even bigger, players run out of money. The key to success, he says, will be size.
”You can’t open just a couple [of clinics] here and there and expect anything meaningful out if it, unless it’s part of a hospital system,” he says. ”So, if you’re truly trying to run this as an independent business start-up, you have to have scale, and that means lots and lots of clinics.”