Urgent Care Kansas City – What Makes a Quality Urgent Care Facility

There are many factors that go into making a quality Urgent Care Center. The common ingredients that make up a quality urgent care facility are:

- Access

- Highly Trained Physicians and highly trained staff members

- Services Offered by the Urgent Care Center

- Latest in Equipment and Technology

- Accepts a variety of insurance coverages

The misuse of emergency rooms for non-life threatening emergencies is a significant reason for skyrocketing health care costs. Patients are often unaware they have an alternative to the emergency room. The urgent care centers are designed to treat those non-life threatening emergencies at a reasonable cost.

Since emergency rooms are designed to handle true emergencies, which are life threatening illnesses or severe trauma, they must be equipped and staffed to handle such emergencies. As such, it costs a lot of money to operate and maintain an emergency room. So when a patient presents to the emergency room with a sore throat, they will be treated but at an enormous cost to the patient and to the health care system.

Often times the emergency rooms are swamped. There are car wreck victims, gunshot wounds, heart attack and various other severe injuries and illnesses. The emergency room’s job is to TRIAGE or sort the severely ill from the lesser ill. Delivery of timely care can mean life or death. As such, patients who present to the emergency room with a broken finger, may not get seen for many hours until the higher priority patients are treated.

However, patients often have non-life threatening emergencies either after hours when they don’t have access to their doctor or don’t have a regular doctor. Those patients don’t know much other way to get care but to go to the emergency room. The other scenario typically encountered is patients that are out of town or new to a town. They haven’t established a doctor-patient relationship yet and have nowhere else to go.

Urgent Care centers certainly fill this need. For non-life threatening illnesses, you certainly can get treated at an emergency room. You’ll have to wait an eternity and it will cost you a king’s ransom, but you’ll get care. You could also be seen rapidly and economically and receive the same level of care at an urgent care facility. So if you’re having a heart attack, you need to be at an emergency room. If your throat is very sore, then you should seek care at your doctor’s office or the urgent care center. Patients find urgent care rooms are much better equipped than their doctor’s office.

Since urgent care centers don’t treat the severely ill, they equip their facility according to the patients they typically treat. They treat the mild to moderate illness or injury but don’t equip themselves for the major trauma or severely sick. By doing so, they overhead is much less than an emergency room. This means urgent care centers are an effective alternative to control costs not only to the patients but to the health care system.

Good Urgent Care Centers will offer services like:

– Treatment for minors and adults

– Services for cuts, fractures, common injuries and common ailments

– State-of-the-art lab and digital x-ray on site

– Some from of assisted transportation

– Vaccinations and physicals for school, sports and pre-employment

– Narcotic, Drug and alcohol screening tests

– Worker’s Compensation Injury treatment and reporting

– Physical Therapy services

– Physical for pre-offer insurances

– On site medication available

– Counseling

– Comforting environment

Many different kinds of doctors staff an urgent care center. However the superior centers usually choose emergency room doctors to staff their centers. Emergency medicine doctors are trained to handle the urgently ill. The mark of a good emergency medicine doctor is board certification which is the acknowledgment by examination by one’s peers of excellence in your field.

Urgent care centers are a great addition to the health care system. They provide prompt, quality service at a fraction of the cost to seek treatment at an emergency room. Urgent care centers also deliver care in a friendly environment that is not sterile, anxiety inducing and uncomfortable like a hospital emergency room.