As Walgreens continues to expand Village Medical primary care clinics alongside its retail stores, CEO Roz Brewer detailed where the company has found success during remarks June 13 at the AHIP 2023 conference.
VillageMD operates more than 680 facilities, including about 200 full-size Village Medical practices alongside Walgreens retail stores and pharmacies. Established in 2013, it also offers standalone Village Medical practices and primary care in patients' homes and virtually.
The company of more than 20,000 employees is majority owned by Walgreens Boots Alliance and completed an estimated $8.9 billion acquisition of Summit Health-CityMD in January, adding more than 2,800 providers to its network. Cigna's Evernorth also invested in the combined company and serves as a minority owner in VillageMD.
Walgreens upped its stake in VillageMD in fall 2021 when it invested $5.2 billion earmarked for at least 600 more Village Medical at Walgreens primary care practices in more than 30 markets by 2025 and 1,000 by 2027, with more than half of those practices in medically underserved communities. The expanded partnership followed the 2019 pilot Walgreens and VillageMD tested in the Houston area with five colocated practices in the Houston area.
In August 2022, Walgreens also completed a majority share acquisition of home healthcare company CareCentrix for $330 million.
With about 200 VillageMD-Walgreens facilities operating nationwide, here are three key takeaways from Ms. Brewer's remarks:
1. Build a continuum of care
"Around 50 percent of all patients will visit a pharmacy for a nonmedical emergency. When you think about that relationship and the continuum of care, you can really understand why that colocated facility or relationship to really triage a patient between a pharmacist and the physician can be critical. CareCentrix has brought us a great opportunity to really think about when that patient is maybe displaced from the hospital or needs that care at home. You can begin to think about that continuum of the prescription, the physician and the at-home acute care. That's why VillageMD and CareCentrix are very important as we're excited about what we can do together."
2. Accept different types of payment
"We see patients that have all kinds of insurance and some with no insurance — we try to address all of those. That's one of the things that attracted us to VillageMD, because they have a broad acceptance of different insurance packages. This is what gives us the ability to take the whole healthcare concept to a local effect."
3. Clinician collaboration is key
"We've built roughly 200 colocated VillageMD clinics with Walgreens, and it's amazing to see some of those when you walk in. You can see the pharmacist triaging with the physician, and it makes all the difference in the world for that patient. In some cases, we've just started a recent bit of work where we put a pharmacist directly with the physician, and it's been interesting to see. We actually did a study with 2,000 participants, which was a pharmacy-led consultation. We could see patients' A1C levels dropping because of adherence through talking to them constantly and creating that relationship they need on a day-to-day basis."