Urgent Care Centers Fill Health Care Gap

Urgent Care Centers are not new to the American health care scene; they have been in existence since the 1970's. What is new is the prevalence of these centers in recent years. There are more than 15,000 urgent care centers dotting the country.

If you're one of the multitudes of people who have gone to a hospital emergency room and waited hours to be seen by a health care provider, you no doubt applaud these urgent care centers. Urgent care differs from emergency care in that the urgent care centers treat non-life threatening illnesses and injuries.

In earlier decades, if you had an acute illness or even a small injury that required stitching, you could call your family physician's office and be seen. True, sometimes you'd have to sit in the doctor's waiting room because you were being worked in among those who had appointments. But you could see your family doctor without the hassles and prices of the emergency room. Those days are behind us for the most part, having gone the way of doctors' house calls.

What we've become much more accustomed to-whether we like it or not-is having to visit an emergency room for acute illnesses and injuries because physician offices are booked full for weeks ahead.

When this trend began to emerge in earnest, hospital administrators began to complain that emergency rooms were becoming essentially health care clinics, which was not their designated purpose. Tell that to a parent who has a toddler with a fever and diarrhea, or to the office worker who is unable to get out of work during a physician's office hours but needs medical treatment for whatever reason. Enter the advent of the urgent care center.

While urgent care centers are not open 24 hours per day, seven days per week as are emergency rooms, many of them offer hours beyond the traditional 9AM-5PM of most physicians' offices. Some of the urgent care facilities are open for some hours on the weekend; the greatest majority of physicians' offices don't provide weekend hours.

Due to the increased popularity and prevalence of the urgent care centers, hospital emergency rooms have a new concern: While any hospital that receives government funding (99.9 per cent do) must treat anyone regardless of ability to pay, most urgent care centers do not. Urgent care centers for the most part agree to see and treat people who have the ability to pay, either with their own money, or with insurance. Hospitals see this as potentially draining on their financial resources, since the emergency rooms will be "left" with those who have little or no financial means for payment.

The question of the costs of malpractice insurance for urgent care centers is in consideration at this time. The urgent care centers' case is that because they treat non-life threatening health concerns, their risk for lawsuits is less-and lawsuit outcomes would be of smaller amounts than in emergency rooms. If this is determined to be so by the malpractice insurers, it will aid in keeping down the costs of urgent care.

Another area of discussion is from certified emergency room physicians who question the abilities of physicians and nurse practitioners who work in urgent care facilities without emergency care certification. Look for this to be a hot topic in the months to come. In addition, there is currently no accreditation for urgent care facilities by any governing bodies. It's hard to imagine the government won't soon "correct" this in the form of hoops through which the urgent care centers will need to jump and money that will have to be paid for accreditation or licensure.

Sadly, whenever there is a dollar to be made, there will be someone right there to make it. From a consumer's perspective, I applaud the care the urgent care centers can provide, and the gap in the health care system they are filling.