In case you missed it, in the last two years the start of the flu shot season has moved up considerably. And the implications for retail clinics are mostly positive. In fact, this could be the best news retail clinics have seen in a long time.

We are all familiar with the predictions of a booming retail clinic industry. But if you think those predictions have ceased, think again.  Merchant Medicine estimates 2,050 retail clinics by the end of 2014.

Of any company we have followed in the retail healthcare space, Solantic seems to hit all the strategic buttons:  stand-alone urgent care centers in high-traffic shopping centers, clinics in Wal-Mart, joint ventures with area health systems, a clinic in the Orlando airport, franchises for physicians, outstanding consumer marketing and a relentless pursuit of customer satisfaction.

Over the long term, it could be that seasonality is the least of a retail clinic operator’s worries. As we noted last month in an article about the long road to breakeven for retail clinic operators, traditional medical practices are taking a page out of the retail clinic playbook and focusing more than ever on patient convenience and consumer marketing. The result is a trend that we call “ConvUrgentCare™,” the merging of convenient care, urgent care and any type of walk-in medicine that involves non-emergent acute medical care.  Today you can see retail clinic techniques crossing over not only to urgent care and emergency care, but also pediatrics, family medicine and work-site clinics.   And these techniques appear to be working to change the game in walk-in medicine.

He has lived in the world of corporate travel management and now the world of healthcare.  Oddly enough, the corporate travel world seems to know a lot more about Hal Rosenbluth than the healthcare world.  But that may be about to change.