Why Should You Care About the Hybrid ER and Urgent Care Model?

Whether consumers visit a freestanding urgent care clinic or an emergency room, they will experience gaps in both systems. Without fail, it is the patient who is almost always bound to fall through these gaps. Most ERs come with hefty deductibles, at around $2,250, to discourage inappropriate utilization. In addition, they are overcrowded. Urgent care facilities offer a more affordable level of care, typically less than $100 for nonemergency, low-acuity care. However, because of the popularity of urgent care facilities, they too have longer than normal wait times and must send patients to ERs if their condition warrants it.

Enter a hybrid ER and urgent care model system. Intuitive Health pioneered the dual ER and urgent care model used today. This model caters to patients of all ages, from pediatrics to adult care, and means facilities are open 24 hours a day and are fully staffed by ER-trained personnel.

All Intuitive Health facilities are conveniently located in retail-like environments. Most importantly, they treat both emergency and non-emergent (low acuity) conditions. Intuitive health patients pay only for the level of care needed. More than 70 percent of all Intuitive Health patients are classified and billed as urgent care patients.

The Dilemma Over Choosing Between ER and Urgent Care

Typical conditions that are hard to tell if you need to visit the ER or urgent care:

• Abdominal Pains
• Allergies
• Breathing and Respiratory Issues
• Chest Pains
• Fractures and Sprains
• Influenza/Flu
• Burns
• Eye Injuries
• Vomiting
• Headaches
• Back Pain
• Lacerations, Wounds, Bleeding
• Seizures
• Sore Throat
• Stroke Symptoms
• Insect Bites, Stings, Allergic Reactions
• Dizziness
• Foreign Body Removal
• High Fever

Imagine your child has a high fever. Using your parent intuition, you think your child is OK but want to make sure. Do you take your child to the ER? Or do you take your child to the urgent care clinic down the street? You trust your gut and go to the urgent care center where you wait for more than an hour to be seen. Then, you are told by the physician that your child should be seen in the ER.

Not only have you wasted potentially precious time in urgent care delaying emergency treatment, but you will likely be forced to wait even more time in your local emergency room. You will also now be responsible for two bills—the urgent care bill and the emergency room bill.

But, if you had taken your child to an Intuitive Health facility, you would have been seen fast—our facilities have one of the lowest wait times available on the market—and you saved money, receiving a single bill and eliminating extraneous costs.

Consumers want to make informed decisions. Intuitive Health gives consumers the power to understand the entirety of their health care experience while they are at one of our facilities. When patients walk into an Intuitive Health center, they are cared for by ER-trained staff and they receive a customer experience unlike any other. From attentive staff to billing transparency, everyone knows exactly what they’re going to get. Most importantly, the patient knows every step of the process and understands the cost they will incur before they leave the building.

Established in 2008 to change the health care landscape, Intuitive Health is a physician-led company that prioritizes patients with an ER and urgent care facility under one roof. This model allows physicians and health care staff to focus on the patient’s needs. After our founders worked in other health care facilities and noticed patients were often unsatisfied with the entirety of their health care experience, the Intuitive Health ER and urgent care model was established to provide compassionate care and timely treatment that helps customers experience peace of mind and value-based treatment.

Even with the influx of new health care systems, the innovative hybrid system pioneered by Intuitive Health is the model major health systems are increasingly choosing as the ideal solution.

To find a location nearest you, visit https://www.iheruc.com/connect/. If you’d like to learn more about our model, visit https://www.iheruc.com/about-us/. Learn more about how we care for our patients at https://www.iheruc.com/patients/.