Urgent Care Centers Popping up in the Midwest

New urgent care centers are popping up across the Midwest, mirroring a national trend and reaffirming patients' growing desire for convenience.

Healthy Trust Immediate Medical Care opened it's Wheeling, Illinois medical clinic in July or 2007. The aim of urgent care centers like healthy Trust Immediate Medical Care is to quickly treat patients who need immediate care but don't require the level of service provided at an emergency room. They're staffed by board certified physicians as well as other medical professionals. There's no need for an appointment, and most urgent care centers are open on weekends and evenings.

Patients with broken bones and earaches are prime candidates. Urgent care centers don't provide long-term management of chronic diseases, but they frequently have X-ray machines, laboratories and other features not found in most physicians' offices.

With many primary care doctors booking appointments weeks in advance and wait times of several hours at emergency rooms, the demand for urgent care centers is growing, experts said. Many insurers are helping drive the expansion by offering patients lower co-pays if they choose an urgent care center over an emergency room.

Urgent care centers like Healthy Trust, many of which were started by physicians' groups, first sprouted up in the early 1980s. Over the next 15 years, a decline occurred. Some of these centers went bankrupt, others were sold to hospitals and then closed. A resurgence began in the mid-1990s. There are between 12,000 and 20,000 of these centers nationwide, according to a 2004 report by the California Healthcare Foundation. A 2005 report in Emergency Medicine Review estimated as many as two new urgent care facilities open each week.

Dr. Boris Gurevich of Healthy Trust Immediate Medical Care points out that several of the urgent care centers locally are within a couple of miles of each other. "The question is how many of these centers will remain self supporting, how many will remain successful?"

Dr. Gurevich believes the centers that survive will provide the services of board certified physicians, and marketing which is directed toward helping the surrounding community get quality health care at an affordable price. he feels that retail clinics staffed by Nurse Practitioners without an onsite lab, and radiology have too narrow a diagnostic scope to survive long term.

Healthy Trust Immediate Medical Care serves the Chicago North Shore Communities of Lake County, Wheeling, Prospect Heights, Lincolnshire, Deerfield, Buffalo Grove, Northbrook, Highland Park, Long Grove, Riverwoods, Des Plaines, Palatine, Glenview, Highwood, Northfield, Libertyville, Winnetka, Arlington Heights, Mount Prospect, Lake Bluff, Lake Forest, Mundelein, and Bannockburn.