Someone once asked me why I write so often about primary care when Merchant Medicine’s focus as a consulting firm is urgent care strategy, development and operations. It is a very legitimate question, and one that naturally leads to what I believe is a roadmap of how primary care and urgent care will evolve over the next few years.…

While researching this article, I came across the following quotes: one from a doctor and one from a patient: From the doctor: “The inability to control the way we practice medicine and deliver care to patients is the reason that physicians are leaving medicine in record numbers. I can tell you that on an ordinary working day, if I didn’t have a single patient to see, I would still be busy for eight or nine hours doing nothing but paperwork and phone calls that are directly related to managed-care issues.”…

No business is immune to ups and downs. And countless books have been written on companies that not only survive challenging times, but come through those times stronger, more nimble and ahead of their competitors.…

Every year we gather input from multiple sources for our mid-year review of the on-demand medicine space: retail clinic openings and closings; urgent care openings and closings; indications from payers as our clients work on contract renewals; reports and speeches from sources we trust on urgent care deal activity; and the many articles that cover high-level topics such as the move from fee-for-service medicine to value-based care.…

Each year we typically use the discussion topics from our strategy symposium as a jumping-off point for this forecast issue. It turns out this approach tends to be fairly reliable and predictive in terms of the trends to expect, not only in the coming year but for two or three years.…

If you are reading this article you are probably an active participant in the on-demand healthcare industry. You probably also think 2017 turned out to be a ho-hum year: no blockbuster urgent care acquisitions like MedExpress…

Late last month the Wall Street Journal broke the news that CVS and Aetna were in merger talks. The quick take away by many who were quoted on the subject was that this deal is all about Amazon. …

No big announcements. Lots of smaller developments. That’s how most industry observers would characterize the state of the on-demand healthcare market in the first half of 2017. …

It seems like every year for the past five years, those of us watching the telemedicine industry say it’s about to take off. Indeed, we continue to see glimpses of momentum. On the technology front prices have come down and quality continues to improve.…