After practice acquisitions, VillageMD sets sight on Walgreens clinics

Village Practice Management Company LLC’s acquisition of local primary-care groups Associates in Family Medicine and Rocky Mountain Family Practice is just the beginning of the Chicago-based clinic chain’s expansion into the Boulder Valley and Northern Colorado markets.

The company will now turn its attention to integrating the two new practices and further expanding by opening co-located clinics within Walgreens pharmacy locations.

VillageMD operates medical clinics within hundreds of Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. (Nasdaq: WBA) stores around the country.

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“We have profiled the top 100 metropolitan statistical areas in the U.S. and have a well-defined plan of markets we’re going to enter. The Northern Colorado and Denver markets are included” among the company’s top targets for growth,” VillageMD co-founder and chief strategy officer Paul Martino told BizWest. “Given the footprint that [Walgreens] has in the Colorado market broadly, we also concluded that it would be a good market for our co-located clinics.”

The co-located clinics are typically about 3,300 square feet.

“We completely wall it off and build a fully functioning primary care clinic” with nine exam rooms, behavioral and telehealth capabilities and a lab, Martino said.

Existing employees at the newly acquired clinics may be used to help staff the co-located operations, and “if they can’t, we will begin the recruitment process,” he said.

Depending on the market conditions and the lease situation at the acquired practice operations, VillageMD may choose to keep them in their current locations or could merge them with co-located clinics. 

At Associates in Family Medicine, which operates in Fort Collins, Loveland and Windsor, and Rocky Mountain Family Practice in Longmont, an “integration team” from VillageMD will be spending the next few months “on the ground, learning more about all of the practices,” Martino said, adding that “these are high-functioning businesses and the goal is to allow them to remain high-functioning businesses” with additional resources from VillageMD.

“The teams on the ground there stay there and we optimize performance,” he said.