PIPages
Labs

Pragya Kakani

Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career

What happens to older adults' health care when big retailers start running doctors' offices? Good access to primary care providers (PCPs), the physicians and advanced practice providers who handle everyday care, is linked to better health.

Fields

Public Health & Epidemiology

Social Science

Medicine & Clinical Research

Topics

health services research

health policy

health economics

Grants
1 known grant, through Dec 2030

What they work on

  1. Compare the neighborhoods, primary care providers and older adult patients of retailer-owned primary care clinics (such as those owned by CVS, Walgreens, Walmart and Amazon) with other practices to identify implications for access and quality.
  2. Estimate the impact of retailer-owned primary care clinics on access to and quality of care for adults 65 and older, using advanced statistical methods for causal inference.
  3. Characterize, through qualitative research, how healthcare executives, clinic primary care providers and specialists view the factors that shape care delivery for older adults at retailer-owned clinics.

More about the research

Primary care is especially important for coordinating the complex needs of an aging population. In recent years, major pharmacy chains and retailers have poured money into primary care. Walgreens invested over $6 billion in VillageMD, CVS bought Oak Street Health for $10.6 billion, Walmart opened 51 Health Centers, and Amazon, which runs a mail-order pharmacy, bought One Medical for $3.9 billion. Many of these retailer-owned clinics target adults 65 and older, seeing a chance to profit from value-based Medicare contracts. Their effects on access to and quality of care are unknown.

Why it matters

Corporate ownership is reshaping primary care for people on Medicare. Evidence on whether retailer-owned clinics improve or harm access to and quality of care for adults 65 and older could inform clinicians, patients and payers. It could also guide policymakers working to improve primary care and regulators who review healthcare mergers and acquisitions.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

Major pharmacy chain and retailer investments in primary care and implications for access to and quality of care in older adults

NIH · Mar 2026 – Dec 2030

Closest labs

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Sherri Rose

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Develop microsimulation models of the health care system's cause-and-effect network to estimate how an algorithm would affect access, quality and costs before deployment, using billing claims, primary care records and qualitative data.

Samira Soleimanpour

University of California-San Francisco, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology

Survey a nationally representative sample of school-based health centers on staffing models and care delivery practices, and create a standard classification system for SBHC research and design.

The school

Weill Medical College of Cornell University: 35 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 59 research doctorates a year.

More about Weill Medical College of Cornell University

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