Retail and Real Estate: The Changing Landscape of Care Delivery

By its nature, retail medicine is founded in real estate. That retail medicine has expanded so dramatically in a relatively short period of time has taken people by surprise. This rapid growth of integrating healthcare services into retail real estate begs the question of whether real estate will eventually take on the importance in healthcare delivery that it has in retail. This article advances the view that it will. In the end, what retail and healthcare have in common is that they both reflect the attributes of demanding consumers as part of an experience-based economy, where products and services are sought based on how they fit with their lifestyles and how they make them feel (Pine and Gilmore 1998). Changing the selection process for healthcare services to be more like retail is already expanding how and where healthcare services are delivered.