Retail Healthcare News

The corner of Alafaya Drive and Lake Underhill Road in east Orange County features a Florida Hospital Centra Care, a Walgreens Take Care Health Clinic and a CVS Minute Clinic — in addition to The miniER that Boaz co-owns. A Publix Little Clinic is less than 2 miles away.

Nevertheless, business is brisk at The mini- ER, especially since mid-May, when Boaz had an outdoor-advertising balloon put up at the busy intersection. A nurse practitioner with 10 years of emergency-room experience, Boaz said his Waterford Lakes clinic is treating about 175 patients a week.

The miniER, staffed by physicians specializing in emergency medicine, is the first of what Boaz hopes will be a chain of three urgent-care centers in Central Florida.

While that would be big news for him and his partner, Dr. Brantley Molpus, they’re small fish in a sea of Central Florida urgent-care centers and other walk-in clinics.

Jacksonville-based Solantic Corp. last month opened its sixth urgent-care center in the Orlando area. Centra Care, with 16 Central Florida locations, will open three more before this summer ends.

“Orlando seems to be one of the hot places” for urgent-care clinics, said Dr. Scott Brady, president of Centra Care.

Urgent-care centers, he explained, are staffed by physicians, include on-site X-rays and lab work, and can handle urgent yet non-life-threatening medical problems such as minor fractures and moderately severe lacerations.

The other kind of medical walk-in clinic, Brady said, are convenience-care clinics staffed by nurse practitioners. “They see five or six different things, the itis’s — sinusitis, conjunctivitis, head-cold kind of things,” he said.

Convenience-care clinics may be more limited in scope, but they’re typically less expensive than urgent-care centers and appropriate for many common medical problems. They, too, are proliferating.

CVS, Walgreens and Publix collectively have more than two dozen convenient-care clinics in Central Florida, and Wal-Mart is planning to open “RediClinics” soon in selected SuperCenters

Earlier this month, Walgreens’ Take Care Health Clinics announced it had treated its 500,000th patient. Earlier this year, CVS’ Minute Clinic announced it had opened its 500th location.

Other players with two or more medical walk-ins in Central Florida include Ohio-based America’s Urgent Care, NTC-Urgent Care Center in Clermont, and two urgent-care companies that specialize in children: After Hours Pediatrics and Night Lite Pediatrics.

Medical walk-ins “are profitable, or they wouldn’t be popping up all over the place,” said Boaz of The miniER.

But while profitable, walk-ins do not appear to have fulfilled one of their expressed purposes: relieving pressure on hospitals’ crowded emergency departments.

According to industry estimates, convenient-care centers can provide appropriate treatment for 40 percent of all ER patients, while urgent-care centers could treat as many as 85 percent of those who typically head to the ER.

Nevertheless, “folks that are uninsured and don’t have any money to go to a convenient-care clinic will go to the ER,” said Brady of Centra Care. And if her young child has a fever at night, “mama is going to the ER. It’s difficult to educate and redirect people to the appropriate place.”

Boaz said insurance companies contribute to the problem by not giving those with medical insurance enough financial incentive to avoid ERs when doing so is appropriate.

Most private insurance plans charge co-payments of $100 or less for an ER visit, he said, while co-pays for an urgent-care visit is typically about $50. “That’s not enough of a gap,” Boaz said. “If it were $50 vs. $250, most people would probably go to urgent care.”

If money isn’t an incentive to avoid the hospital ER, time should be. Richard Scott, chairman of Solantic, noted that one reason for the long waits in hospital emergency departments is that they have to take true emergencies first. Those who show up without life-threatening conditions have to wait.

“We don’t have emergency patients,” Scott said, so “it’s first-come, first-served. Our goal is for everybody to be in and out within an hour.”

Source: OrlandoSentinel.com
Original Publication Date: June 30, 2008