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Check Up Before You Check Out
Retail clinics offer convenient, low-cost preventive health care and treatment for minor injury and illness. When a retail clinic opens, the rate of visits to the emergency room for these low-severity conditions declines for people who live in close proximity.
Working Paper
Check Up Before You Check Out: Retail Clinics and Emergency Room Use
Retail clinics are an innovation that has the potential to improve competition in health care markets. We use the universe of emergency room (ER) visits in New Jersey from 2006-2014 to examine the impact of retail clinics on ER usage. We find significant effects of retail clinics on ER visits for both minor and preventable conditions; Residents residing close to an open clinic are 4.1-12.3 percent less likely to use an ER for these conditions. Our estimates suggest annual cost savings from reduced ER usage of over $70 million if retail clinics were made readily available across New Jersey.