The Future of Healthcare May Look Surprisingly Ordinary

As pharmacies take on a larger role in delivering care, they are challenging a long-standing assumption about medicine: that healthcare has to happen in a traditional healthcare setting. 

For most of modern medicine, receiving healthcare has meant going somewhere specifically designed for it. We visit our primary care physician (PCP) for an annual checkup, a hospital when something is seriously wrong, or a specialty clinic for everything in between. Yet one of the most significant shifts in where Americans receive care is happening somewhere far less “clinical”: the neighborhood retail drugstore. 

Walk into a CVS or Walgreens today, and the dichotomies are hard to miss. You can buy toothpaste in one aisle, and pick up a prescription and get vaccinated in the next, all without leaving the building. Depending on location and state, patients may also receive health screenings, medication therapy management (MTM), or treatment for certain chronic conditions through programs such as CVS’s Minute Clinic or The Little Clinic inside Kroger stores. Pharmacists increasingly help manage chronic diseases and, in some states, can prescribe medications such as contraceptives. The person we once thought of primarily as the final checkpoint between a physician’s prescription and a bottle of medication is increasingly becoming a direct provider of care.

None of this happened overnight. Pharmacists have long played a clinical role, and conversations about expanding their scope of practice are not new. But focusing only on what pharmacists can and cannot do misses something larger. The expansion of pharmacy-based care challenges one of healthcare’s most persistent assumptions: that meaningful medical care must be delivered within the walls of a physician’s office, clinic, or hospital. 

COVID-19 made that assumption particularly difficult to maintain. Pharmacies became critical sites for testing and vaccination, allowing patients to receive an essential medical intervention in the same places they already visited for prescriptions and everyday necessities. What was remarkable was how quickly this stopped feeling remarkable. The pandemic did not suddenly turn pharmacists into healthcare professionals, but it made their capacity to deliver care difficult to overlook.

That accessibility matters, but not simply because pharmacies can offer a more convenient alternative to a doctor’s appointment. Pharmacies occupy a unique place in American life precisely because they are not isolated from it. They sit in neighborhoods, grocery stores, shopping centers, and communities where traditional medical facilities may be less present. Patients do not necessarily have to treat every interaction with the healthcare system as a separate event requiring an explicitly medical space. Healthcare can increasingly meet them in places they already go.

There is, however, an uncomfortable contradiction in this transformation. Just as pharmacies are becoming more valuable as sites of healthcare delivery, the businesses supporting them are struggling. Declining prescription margins and reimbursement pressures have contributed to closures among independent pharmacies and major chains alike. These pressures may be further complicated by the increasing vertical integration of the healthcare industry. CVS Health, for example, owns both CVS Pharmacy and Aetna, one of the country’s largest health insurers, as well as the pharmacy benefit manager Caremark. This consolidation increasingly places the financing, management, and delivery of prescription drugs within the same corporate systems, raising questions about how reimbursement decisions shape which pharmacies can remain financially viable. CVS has closed hundreds of stores in recent years, while independent community pharmacies have also disappeared. If pharmacies continue to assume greater clinical importance, a closure no longer represents only the loss of a place to pick up medication. It can also mean losing a point of connection to the healthcare system.

The benefits of pharmacies do not mean that they should become a substitute for the physician’s office. A blood pressure screening at a pharmacy is not longitudinal primary care, and a pharmacist consultation cannot replace a physician who may understand years of a patient’s medical history. As care becomes distributed across pharmacies, retail clinics, telehealth platforms, and traditional practices, fragmentation is a legitimate concern. Making healthcare easier to access means little if each encounter exists in isolation from the next.

However, this choice does not have to be between traditional medicine and pharmacy-based care. Different healthcare settings can serve different purposes. The significance of the pharmacy’s evolution is not that pharmacists will replace physicians, but that it challenges the idea that healthcare must begin with one.

The pharmacy may be one of the first places where this change has become impossible to ignore, but it likely will not be the last. As technology and new models of care push medicine further into homes and other everyday spaces, the boundaries around where healthcare “belongs” will continue to blur. The future of healthcare may therefore look surprisingly ordinary. And perhaps that is precisely the point: the best place for some healthcare may be where people already are.

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