Time and money, patients say they save both by using urgent care clinics instead of going to their primary care physician or to an emergency room. When Katy Arterburn’s son Jason came down with a sore throat while on vacation in Colorado, she brought him to Rocky Mountain Urgent Care in Aurora. When the doctor asked what she could do for him he replied, “I guess just diagnose whatever I have and give me the meds to make me better.” Even back home in Alabama that desire for convenience has made urgent care the medical care venue of choice for the Arterburn family, according to Jason’s mom. “Our primary care is booked solid all the time so usually when something comes up if we need to be diagnosed right away so a hundred percent of the time we go to a walk in clinic like this, because we can be seen and be on our way.”

Urgent care clinics have been around for a decade and in the last four years their number has doubled to about 8,000 nationwide. Their appeal lies largely in their extended and weekend hours, giving patients an option other than waiting for an opening at their doctor’s office, or opting for an expensive emergency room visit.

Most urgent cares are staffed by board certified doctors though in the last few years a subset of urgent cares has emerged, located in supermarkets, pharmacies and big box stores. These “retail care” clinics are usually staffed only by a physicians assistant or a nurse practitioner and offer limited services like giving vaccinations or treating things like colds and sore throats. From only a handful in 2006, retail care clinics now number more than a thousand nationwide with many more planned.

Some in the medical profession worry that the rapidly growing use of walk-in care could be hazardous to your health. Dr. Lori Heim, spokeswoman for the American Academy of Family Physicians, worries that primary care physicians are being cut out of the information loop. That’s because urgent care centers are not required to inform primary care physicians of treatment they provide to patients. While most encourage patients to keep their PCP’s informed, it’s not difficult to imagine that many or even most patients do not. Dr. Heim cautions, “When we put the responsibility on the patient, to understand all of their problems, their medication, what their treatment plan is I think that’s unfair. And what we’ve also recognized, when a patient is sick, that’s the time when it’s the very hardest for a patient to be their own advocate.”
The concern is that without a single doctor watching over all the care a patient receives, a role primary care physicians are intended to play, problems could be missed or mis-diagnosed, medications could interact and so on, creating serious or even deadly consequences. Until the nation’s chronic shortage of primary care physicians is addressed, the convenience and relative inexpenseness of walk-in-medical care will surely continue to grow.