If it?s not a life-threatening situation, waiting 20 minutes at an urgent care center might be a better alternative to an average four-plus hour wait in the emergency room.
Patient First, a primary and urgent care center with five offices in the Baltimore Region, is expanding to the Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore as part of an effort to help relieve overcrowding in the state?s emergency departments.
“We routinely care for about 70 percent of the types of problems that are seen in your typical emergency room,” Patient First Chief Executive Officer Dr. Pete Sowers said. “We have lab, X-ray and prescription services on-site as well as board-certified physicians.”
“We hope, because it?s on our campus, it?s going to be complimentary to our emergency department and provide a venue for people with minor medical issues to go rather than coming to the emergency department,” said Gregory Schaffer, president of Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical center.
The Bayview facility, scheduled to open in November, will be managed by Patient First on behalf of Bayview.
Maryland ranks 45th out of 50 states with an average emergency wait time of four hours and 37 minutes experienced by its 23,365 emergency patients last year, according to information by Press Ganey Associates, a nonprofit dedicated to improving health care performance.
Patients can use Patient First for less critical doctor visits outside of their family practice?s hours or even select a Patient First doctor as a primary care physician.
“I believe we take all Maryland insurance providers at this time,” Sowers said. “We?re sort of in the middle between a traditional patient care office an the hospital emergency room. The scope of our service on the primary care side is what you would expect to see in your standard family practice.”
Further expansions in the Baltimore region are under consideration, he said, but details are not firm enough to make public.
The Richmond, Va.-based company?s moves are driven by demand and emergency room use in Maryland, Sowers said.
“We?ve just been fortunate really to have real robust demand at all five centers in Maryland,” he said. “What we really want to stay abreast of is the service levels. We don?t want to have overcrowding.”
