Questions for Dr. Stern
About Your Urgent Care Center
58. I have been working in the health care community for the past 6 years as I have been achieving my current status as a BSRN in one of the busiest Emergency Departments. My city is one of the thousands who have are seeing the overcrowded ED's, and burned out staff because of the constant pace and lower higher patient to nurse ratios. The city and the surrounding areas have a few established Urgent Care centers which do VERY well, but the need for more is drastically increasing. I did have the luxury of helping to establish one of the newest centers, but came on board the very first day the doors opened. I have learned some of the marketing, coding, billing process but certainly was out of the loop for all of the pre-work that went into the project. Sadly the owners split the practice after a big fight and neither of them care to talk about the experience. My immediate family is filled with RN's, RRT's and PA's all wanting to do the best that we can. I am not sure what your company can do for us, but I reaching out to anyone who might lend assistance in helping us establish our own center. I am a toddler at this, knowing very little, so most of the process will be completely new to me. Obviously my first question/hurdle is finding the funds. I haven't done much research but I was wondering if there are any grants or businesses that take on projects like this. Again, anything to help would be appreciated. Thank you for your time and effort.
Urgent care is an exciting field with many opportunities for growth in your area of the country. Some of the payors in New York have not been particularly friendly to urgent care. Yesterday, Empire announced that they will be opening their own centers for their members. I am not sure what their intent is, but they may be trying to cut out independent operators from serving the urgent care needs of their members. Of course, this would not serve Empire nor their members well, but managed care payors have continuously made lots of mistakes in dealing with urgent care issues.You are right about the first hurdle being to find the funds. You could get an SBA loan, but this is unlikely to be for over $100K, and starting up an urgent care center. You will probably need to work with your network of friends and family to come up with ~$500,000 of extra capital in order to start an urgent care center. Banks will rarely loan you the needed funds, unless you can back it with equity in your house or other assets. Getting providers to work for "sweat equity" (using deferred wages, i.e., working for free to buy into ownership) is another way to reduce the need for capital. If you would like to come out and visit with us for a day, we provide full-day tours of our centers almost every week. Our headquarters is an hour west of Chicago O'Hare Airport. Over 300 people took advantage of these tours last year. Simply call Practice Velocity and ask for Dana or Tina, and they will be happy to schedule your tour.
