Why Healthcare Kiosks Benefit Retailers

By Dave King, Senior Vice President, Frank Mayer and Associates, Inc

Over the last several years retailers have placed themselves on the frontlines of health care delivery, forming partnerships with clinics and hospitals to make primary care available to their customers. As retailers have worked through the challenges of forming the necessary alliances, which must be forged on a regional rather than national basis, they’re coming to the realization that self-service has a role to play in their strategies.

Self Service Adds a New Option to Retail Health Care
Self-service kiosks have been used in traditional health care settings for wayfinding, patient check-in, health education and visitor access. Now consumer-directed health care and user-friendly self-service technology have converged to make retailers a natural setting for health kiosks designed for education and wellness screening. 

The SoloHealth Station® is a good example of how interactive technology can play a significant role in retail health care. SoloHealth is on a short list of FDA-approved providers that retailers are turning to for self-service consumer health care. There are currently over 1,400 SoloHealth Stations in select retailers across the U.S., including Walmart, Sam’s Club, Safeway, and Schnucks Markets. The company predicts that number to grow to 4,000 by the end of 2014.

The SoloHealth Station® enables self-service health screenings for vision, blood pressure, weight, and body mass index, a symptom checker, and an overall health assessment free of charge.  The kiosk also helps connect consumers to local professionals through their databases, helping people enter the most appropriate and accurate point in the health care system.

Another self-service concept in limited test from a different provider enables a professional connection on the spot through telepresence. Consumers use various self-service diagnostic tools inside the kiosk and consult with an on-screen medical professional remotely.

There are obvious benefits to retailers that incorporate a self-service option in their retail health care strategies:

• The value of certain types of screening like weight and blood pressure is repetition, which plays right into the traffic-building, loyalty-building objectives.
• Self-service health kiosks are easily scalable, eliminating some of the obstacles involved in finding health care delivery partnerships.
• Interactive, self-service kiosks are ideally suited to deliver targeted messages about brands in the store that are relevant to the assessments individuals are doing.

Consumer satisfaction has an obvious halo effect for retailers as well:

• Self-service health care at retail is convenient. It puts assessment and prevention education squarely in the path of consumers’ everyday lives.
• There is a consistency of experience that retailers can deliver and consumers appreciate.

Beyond strategic business aims lies a societal benefit to health and wellness screening that Bart Foster, founder and CEO of SoloHealth® voiced saying, “Awareness and prevention are probably the best frontline defense against poor health and cutting unnecessary costs across the board.” Notably, the kiosk’s engagement statistics show that 71% of users are at medium to high risk for hypertension, while 51% are overwe