The Rise of Urgent Care Centers in Northwest Indiana

A lot of Americans these days are turning towards urgent care centers instead of traditional health care institutions for quicker and sometimes cheaper health care needs. They can be entertained faster for their concerns in these urgent care centers unlike hospitals wherein you need to fall in line along with numerous patients who have respective health issues as well. Also, you need to set appointments with doctors beforehand with hospitals unlike with an urgent care center wherein you can simply walk in and expect to see a doctor right away. Urgent care centers are proven to be more convenient these days most especially with the fast pace of life that everyone is living right now.

The rise of urgent care centers has been alarming to major healthcare institutions and hospital chains that they started to offer mergers and acquisitions of different urgent care centers. Health systems also followed the route as more and more strike deals of joint business ventures with some of the urgent care owners. The biggest factor to this development is not because a lot of small-time urgent care centers have come up but mainly because of the rise in numbers of patients who are over 50 years of age. Senior citizens prefer urgent care centers because they can expect urgent visits from a doctor in there unlike being connected to a larger system wherein scheduling and intervals are part of the routine.

The Urgent Care Association of America declared that there are already more than 10,000 urgent care centers all over America and 38% of them are owned by or in joint venture with hospitals. More than 80% of these urgent care centers opened a new branch for the year 2015 while 90% of them all said that there has been a patients’ visit increase in 2015 compared to the previous year. These numbers clearly show that urgent care centers certainly have become a major role player in the healthcare industry and more and more people are embracing this type of health care provision setup.

In the side of patients, their only concern towards an urgent care center is that it needs to be connected to a health system for them to avail of services such as being easily transferred to an emergency room or be referred to a specialist in case the need calls for it. Urgent care centers can only provide basic health care but they aren’t equipped with state of the art modern technology that sometimes patients may need for emergency purposes. But if an urgent care center is connected to a major hospital or health care organization then the transferring from urgent care center to a hospital would be more convenient for the patients since priority is already assured.

Tighter Rules and Conditions on Urgent Care Centers

If the trend of more urgent care centers opening up and more patients relying on them for health care provision in the years to come then I believe that health care organizations should already establish a condition that urgent care centers need to be connected to at least one health care system. This way, patients all around America are rest assured that their major concern is covered in case emergencies arise and there is a need for a better health care provision. All urgent care centers can be considered as legitimate by then and business minded individuals cannot just see it as a business opportunity when starting an urgent care center since there are already more strict terms and conditions revolving around the idea of it.