If you or your family haven’t visited an urgent care facility before, you may want to learn more about this convenient and less-expensive medical care option. Instead of going to a traditional hospital emergency room for non-emergency visits, you can visit a local urgent care facility. Once you have experienced the professional level of care that is available, you will understand the benefits of these local clinics.

There are many advantages of urgent care. An urgent care clinic can provide preventative care such as flu vaccinations and wellness check-ups. These clinics can also attend to advanced urgent care needs such as providing intravenous fluids and setting and/or splinting bone fractures. Roughly 40% of these centers also have these traditional hospital systems in place:

• Electronic prescription ordering systems
• Computerized systems for viewing lab and imaging results
• Patient demographic collection
• Condition and procedure coding
• Clinical note-taking
• Billing

One of several advantages of urgent care is less waiting time. You may only need to wait up to 15 minutes to see a physician or mid-level provider. It’s important to note that roughly 65% of these centers always have an on-site physician available for patients. The Urgent Care Association of America’s recent survey showed that 57% of patients only needed to wait for 15 minutes or less, and the appointments for 80% of these individuals lasted up to an hour.

Other advantages of urgent care include hours of operation. Over 66% of these facilities open before 9:00 a.m during the week, and others may also do so on Saturday and Sunday. Most centers stay open until 7:00 p.m., while 2 out of 5 will remain open up until 9:00 p.m. or even later.

When you have a non-emergency medical issue, consider the benefits and advantages of going to an urgent care center rather than the hospital. You and your family will receive the same level of care for a fraction of the cost and with less waiting time. Furthermore, when you visit an urgent care center, they will be able to provide you with ongoing care should you require it. In this way, you can benefit from having the same primary care physician.