More and more health care is happening outside traditional medical offices. Often, that means patients are getting basic care inside big retail stores. In November, Kaiser Permanente opened four clinics inside Target stores across Southern California.
The clinic at the Target in Mission Valley is tucked away near the back of the store, far past the registers and a few aisles down from the cafe serving pizza and popcorn. Through a door next to the pharmacy, shoppers will find a quiet reception area and a pair of exam rooms where they can see a nurse practitioner.
Dr. Paul Bernstein, Kaiser's medical director in San Diego, said these clinics offer patients maximum convenience. They provide preventative tests, cholesterol checks, blood sugar tests, help with smoking cessation and children's physical exams.
He said you could be at Target buying some diapers "and if your kid happens to have an earache at the same time, instead of thinking, 'Ugh, do I have to go to urgent care, or go somewhere else?', you just walk a couple aisles over."
Patients can even see a doctor — at least one on a screen. They have the option to videoconference with someone like Dr. Heidi Meyer, a Kaiser family physician who spends part of her time on call from an office about 15 miles away. She says most patients get over any initial awkwardness that might come with talking to a doctor virtually.
"Sometimes they feel that it was more intimate," she said, noting how webcams can sometimes make doctors look directly at patients more than they might in person. "Patients feel listened to a little bit more."
Kaiser says telemedicine works for these clinics because remote doctors are looking at the same electronic files as nurses in the clinic.
But shuffling digital files between medical offices and retail stores has its risks, said Eva Velasquez, president and CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center. According to the center's tally, health care reported the most data breaches of all industries in 2014.
"They have struggled," said Velasquez, who worries about health care companies joining forces with retailers. Especially a retailer like Target. She says the resource center fielded a huge spike in calls in 2013, when millions of Target customers had their credit card data compromised.
"Those vulnerabilities that they each had individually have now expanded," Velasquez said. "Here's a health care entity that now has, potentially, the same vulnerabilities as a retail entity and vice versa."
Kaiser said it remains tasked with keeping medical information secure but defers to Target on any breach that might happen in its payment system. It's a balancing act security experts will be watching as retail clinics expand. Kaiser is hoping to open more clinics in California Targets later this year.
