How one doctor fights the pandemic—profitably
DR. RAHUL KHARE KNOWS what some people are saying about him— that he’s opportunistic. And to some extent, he said, they’re right.
The Innovative Express Care CEO built a large-scale COVID-19 testing program early in the pandemic that has turned out to be quite lucrative. Now, as one of the only private practitioners in Chicago with access to coveted vaccines, he said he’s inking a deal with Chicago Public Schools to inoculate tens of thousands of teachers and staff.
“Are we profiting from a pandemic? Yeah, I am. I have mixed feelings about that,” said Khare, who left Northwestern Medicine to launch his first clinic in 2015 with only a handful of patients— one of whom was his mother.
Before COVID hit, the primary-care, urgent-care and behavioral health practice was seeing about 200 patients a day and raking in $1 million a year, Khare said. Now, with eight locations, it’s up to about 3,000 patients a day and $15 million. He used some of the funds to open four new sites in the last six months and aims to continue expanding.
“People think of me as opportunistic,” Khare said. “Yeah, there was an opportunity to test a lot of people. There’s opportunity for me to give vaccines to millions of people in Chicago. We can help end this pandemic and, yes, I will profit from that.”
A big opportunity came in April with the introduction of antibody testing, which aims to show whether patients were exposed to the virus. The testing operation quickly outgrew the congested clinic parking lot, so Khare moved its orange tents to a former car dealership lot and ramped up to 500 tests per day. Innovative Express Care charges $250 a test to patients who pay out of pocket, but Khare said most people use insurance. Khare also sells at-home, saliva-based COVID testing kits for $125.
Experts have questioned the value of antibody tests since they don’t address a person’s risk of reinfection and could be used to make unfounded decisions about returning to work or traveling, for example. But with so many unknowns, antibody tests allow the curious to learn if they may have been infected by the virus.
Plus, at a time when low payments from health insurers have led some doctors to stop testing patients for COVID-19, Innovative Express Care has found a way to continue offering the necessary service, said Valerie Gutmann Koch, director of law and ethics at the University of Chicago’s MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics.
“They’ve got it up to scale where we know we can go and rely on them to get a relatively accurate (polymerase chain reaction) test, for example, and get results within a couple days—and not pay out of pocket for that,” Koch said. From Zoom to Peloton, “there are definitely companies that have profited from the circumstances we currently find ourselves in. The fact that they’re profiting per se isn’t problematic.”
But how did Khare manage to get his hands on scarce vaccines? City officials say they’re getting a relatively small number of doses from the federal government, and the vast majority of shots are being distributed to city-run mass vaccination sites and hospitals. In fact, Innovative Express Care is one of the few private facilities listed on the city’s Zocdoc scheduler tool, along with Rush University Medical Center and Erie Family Health Centers, a federally qualified health center.
Many local independent medical practices, including urgent-care chains like WellNow and membership-based primary-care providers like ImagineMD, still can’t get vaccines.
“It started with me being persistent about getting doses for my staff,” Khare said. Eventually, after walking the city through his online appointment system and scalable testing operation, he said he got just enough doses to inoculate his workers the week of Jan. 11.
He got another 5,000 doses from the city the week of Jan. 18. And by mid-February, Innovative Express Care had administered roughly 9,000 shots. The injections are either covered by insurance, the federal CARES Act or offered at no cost to patients.
A Chicago Department of Public Health representative did not comment on how Innovative Express Care came to get an allotment of vaccines from the city, saying only that the practice gets doses the same way as other clinics and hospitals.
Meanwhile, he said he’s been awarded a contract to vaccinate tens of thousands of Chicago Public Schools workers covered under Phase 1B of the city’s vaccine rollout. Under the terms of the deal, Khare said he would get doses earmarked for CPS each week and receive a fixed payment for each shot administered. ●
This article originally appeared in Crain’s Chicago Business, a sister publication to Modern Healthcare.