The MinuteClinic Story

We opened our first clinic in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area in 2000, making MinuteClinic an independent retail health care provider — the very first of its kind. Today, we are the largest retail health care provider in the nation. And our affiliation with CVS/Caremark allows us to offer high-quality care with the convenience our founders always envisioned.

The idea? Quick, convenient, affordable.

On a wintry weekend in 1999, Rick Krieger took his sick son to an urgent care center in Minneapolis. The boy needed a strep throat test and, after a two-hour wait, finally got one. Krieger knew there had to be a better way. With his partners Douglas Smith, M.D., Steve Pontius and Kevin Smith, RN, FNP, Krieger formed the idea of a retail health care model — convenient clinic locations staffed by talented practitioners who could focus treatment to common family medical conditions. The kind of top-quality care you might expect from your doctor's office, urgent care center or emergency room, but made quick and affordable.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Today, MinuteClinic operates over 500 clinics in 25 states. As we've grown, we've made a name for ourselves, not only as the pioneer in retail health care, but also as its leader and premier innovator. We're known for our effective processes that ensure clinical quality and patient-centered experiences, and for continually improving upon our standards for clinical quality. We're the first retail clinic to seek out and achieve The Joint Commission Accreditation.

We're also known for the quality of our practitioners. In fact, it's one of the things that keep patients coming back. Continually, our patient satisfaction level is at a remarkable 97+%, and our patients rank our services as among the best.