Page 34 - Delaware Medical Journal - January/February 2020

Can’t Live with Them, Can’t Live Without Them?
Tips for Coexisting with Urgent Care Centers
Tina Irgang Leaderman Americans, especially millennials,
value convenience in health
care — a trend that’s led to a
rise in urgent care centers. According to Consumer Reports, the number of urgent care centers in the U.S. increased from
At the same time, a 2016 poll by NPR and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that when patients were asked why they chose to visit urgent care facilities, the top responses included “thought
it would take less time to be seen and treated” (22%), “location was more convenient” (21%), and “hours were more convenient” (17%).
The convenience of urgent care facilities can be a good thing for patients,
especially because it may keep them from making a more expensive ER visit for an acute need, says Kristine Diehl, MD, of Delaware Family Care in Wilmington. Diehl has been in primary care for more than 20 years, and collaborates closely with Silverside Medical Aid Unit, an independent urgent care center that’s in the same building as Diehl’s practice.
However, she says, not all urgent
care facilities are as diligent about communicating with PCPs about their patients. “It’s delicate,” Diehl says. “You can’t tell another doctor how they should be doing things.”
From an urgent care center’s perspective, sheer volume makes it challenging to forward information to every single patient’s PCP, says Jack Horowitz, MD,
Medical Director at Newark Urgent Care (NUC). NUC does send information on its patients through the Delaware Health Information Network, but it isn’t always clear whether that information ultimately reaches the PCP, he says.
STAYING TOP OF MIND FOR PATIENTS, URGENT CARE PROVIDERS
Given the challenges of keeping track of patients’ urgent care visits, how can PCPs coexist with urgent cares in their community while still building their practice?
Try to get on your local urgent cares’ referral list. “If a private PCP is looking to build their practice, it would be helpful
34
Del Med J | January/February 2020 | Vol. 92 | No. 1