Questions for Dr. Stern
About Your Urgent Care Center
6. I am a family practice physician in West Virginia, and I typically moonlight 4 days a month in local ERs. I and four partners own a private family practice next door to our local hospital where we can get x-rays conveniently. We have a full lab in the office. I am thinking of starting up an evening urgent care clinic to increase revenue and to add convenience for our patients. I would probably use our existing office and rent the space from our partnership. We have a fully integrated software program - Greenway - that we are 9 months into implementing, I could probably have the practice do my billing for a fee. I have 4 partners in our practice but I guess that I would start this urgent care clinic solo. I would like information and advice from you on how to get the urgent care clinic started with my current assets. I am in no great hurry and will take my time and try to do this efficiently and cost-effectively.
Good to hear from you. It sounds like what you are describing is adding after-hours services to your primary care practice. This can be done successfully, but I would be quite surprised if your partners will allow you to do this simply for rent in return. They will likely want a significant part of the ownership in return for allowing you to use so many assets of the current practice. Note: the pure after-hours model is difficult to make work because the public use urgent care centers most frequently during weekdays (I know this seems counter-intuitive, but it is an almost inescapable fact. Monday morning is the busiest time in virtually every urgent care center). The public will be much less likely to form habits of using your office if they are only able to access walk in services after normal office hours. I would suggest that you look into opening a true urgent care center. Our experience is that West Virginia is one of the best states in which to open an urgent care center, and some centers actually start seeing 40 patients per day within a few months. That means that total losses are minimized, and you can open the center with a quite reasonable investment. If you simply take your current patients with you to the new office, you can do open an urgent care center for a fraction of the normal cost.
