What are your family’s most memorable health care visits?
For many, these visits include evening and weekend emergency trips to quick care clinic around the country. From a quick x-ray at a urgent care Allen TX to a couple of stitches in an urgent care setting Chicago IL, families often have some fairly memorable stories from their visits for health care across America. Whether a family has that one son who gets injured skiing in Denver CO or end up visiting urgent care Allen TX after what should have been a tame afternoon hike, the tales of emergency visits are often the stuff that legends are made of.
No matter if your family’s next visit to the urgent care Allen TX is the first or your family’s visit to the urgent care Shreveport LA is becoming a monthly event, you are probably looking for three basic things: convenience, quality care, and affordability.
Emergency Care Needs to be Quickly Available and Convenient
Interestingly enough, sometimes the slowest care you will ever get is the care you seek at a hospital emergency room. Triaged according to the severity, emergency room patients are almost never seen in the order that they arrive. And while some families may still think of emergency care as being fast, the exact opposite is often the case. With competition from patients arriving in ambulances, emergency room care for the child in need of an x-ray can slide way down the list. With the arm immobilized and some pain medication administered, for example, a young child and her parents can wait hours for care that could have more quickly been given in another setting.
For this reason, many families decide to get the convenient care that they need at the nearest urgent care setting. Most of ten far less busy than both family pediatrician and hospital offices, urgent care settings see 60% of their visitors within 15 minutes. With nearly 65% of these clinics having a full time physician on staff, the approximately 9,300 walk-in, stand-alone urgent care centers in America are often the most convenient option. With an additional 50 to 100 new clinics opening every year, this looks to be a convenient option for many years to come.
As the nation learns to deal with and treat an increasing number of citizens with access to health care, it only makes sense that many of these patients will look for more convenient options than the traditional family physician or emergency room options.
Quality Care Will Always be the Most Important Goal of Families Seeking Health Care
As America begins to adjust to providing health care platforms to meet the increasing number of individuals with access to insurance, There are currently 20,000 physicians who practice Urgent Care Medicine today, and the number is growing. urgent care professionals have developed urgent care medicine into an important alternative to pediatric office and hospital emergency waiting rooms. Recognizing the need for specialty care that includes everything from administering flu shots to x-raying injuries, the urgent care platform represents the fast-growing medical field.
In fact, some doctors see this platform as their full time career option. Somewhere between the routine well visits of a family physician and the crisis of the hospital emergency room, many doctors see the after hours and weekend clinic platform as a destination, not a training ground waiting for something else.
Money Always Talks When It Comes to Health Care Decisions
Emergency room visits are expensive. With the overhead of an entire hospital and its staff, it should come as no surprise that Urgent Care Allen TX is more affordable than Hospital Emergency Room Care Allen TX. The fact that most insurance plans offer the same kind of coverage in several settings makes the urgent care model even more inviting. If, for instance, an urgent care-treatable case handled in a hospital emergency room costs an average of $2,039, while the same case treated in an urgent care facility costs approximately $226, why would it make sense to select the more expensive, less efficient option of the hospital ER? Patients are finally learning to be consumers even when it comes to their every day health care decisions.
