VillageMD, you know the family practice clinic located in Walgreens, may be sick itself. This from Forbes:

In Walgreens case, the drugstore giant has for several years now been an investor and partner with VillageMD, a Chicago-based startup that has received several billion dollars from Walgreens. Walgreens, which now owns about half of VillageMD, in October announced plans to close 60 underperforming VillageMD locations and exit certain locations to focus on “increased density” in the company’s highest opportunity markets.

They have also “slowed the number of openings of doctor-staffed clinics adjacent to Walgreens drugstores in part because the operators haven’t been able to fill their so-called “patient panels.” 

After two months as Walgreens CEO, Wentworth said in an interview last week he is putting VillageMD “on a diet” so the operator of physician-staffed clinics attached to Walgreens stores can focus on operations such as recruiting more patients to its clinics and “filling out (VillageMD’s) patient panels.”

What does this mean for Direct Primary Care? A lot. These places need volume to succeed. And they were so confident in their predictions:

 Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc. (Nasdaq: WBA) and VillageMD announced today that Walgreens will be the first national pharmacy chain to offer full-service doctor offices co-located at its stores at a large scale, following a highly successful trial begun last year.

This expanded partnership will open 500 to 700 “Village Medical at Walgreens” physician-led primary care clinics in more than 30 U.S. markets in the next five years, with the intent to build hundreds more thereafter.

First, I don’t think these are full-service doctor offices if there are only a few, if any, medical doctors there (I cannot get a solid number on this). Second, if they are failing to fill patient panels then they are doing something wrong, especially with so much foot traffic at Walgreens. Are they unable to get word of mouth? In other words, if they did such a great job they should be turning people away.

I can talk about this all day and how DPC is better but I want to leave you with this one point. This proves that location isn’t everything when deciding on where you should open up your office.