4 Benefits to Using an Urgent Care Center

Even if we are in great health, at one time or another, most of us have been faced with a medical situation that required us to go to a hospital Emergency Room. Accidents, sports injuries and other medical situations that need immediate attention have often seen us ending up there for lack of any other options. Now, however, patients have a viable alternative: an urgent care facility. Here are four benefits to using an urgent care center, also known simply as urgent care.


Convenient Hours
You can never tell when an incident will happen, but you can be pretty sure it will happen unexpectedly, and not at a convenient time. A major advantage to visiting an urgent care is the convenient hours that they are open. A significant number of urgent care centers are open relatively early and stay open pretty late on nights and weekends. During the weekdays, you will easily find a walk-in urgent care center where the doors open early in the morning. Saturdays and Sundays also have many centers opening early, too. This is a real convenience since many unexpected medical situations happen on Saturdays and Sundays. In addition, quality of care counts, too, and a majority of urgent care centers always have a doctor on-site.

Shorter Wait Times
Once you arrive at an urgent care center, the wait is usually very reasonable, even minimal, for most patients. This is not usually the case with a hospital Emergency Room, where patients are seen depending on the severity of their illness/problems. Urgent care will test for strep throat, treat ear infections and sinus infections, and handle sports injuries etc., in a quicker and more cost efficient way than a standard ER. In fact, if you visit an urgent care clinic, you can expect a very short wait. Wait times of 30 minutes or less are standard in 92% of urgent care centers, per the 2016 Benchmarking Report of the Urgent Care Association of America.

Wide Range of Available Treatments
If you’re fortunate enough not to have needed to visit an urgent care center lately, you might be surprised at the wide range of services available. This isn’t just a place for putting on bandages and cleaning up scrapes. Today, a walk-in clinic will be able to take care of patients with fractured bones, while intravenous fluids, if necessary, are also provided in many urgent care centers.

Up-to-Date Administrative Procedures
Getting lost in a sea of paperwork and forms is enough to make anyone sick. Today, electronic prescription ordering systems are used in many urgent care centers. Also, many centers feature computerized methods for billing, coding and reviewing results (lab/image).

To sum up, urgent care centers provide a positive alternative to traditional hospital Emergency Room visits, providing peace of mind by taking less time and costing less money. Most of us would rather not think about urgent care as we go about our everyday routines. But when the unexpected makes a visit, it’s a great relief to know that an urgent care facility is available.