Urgent care booms, and opens this summer in Gilford

GILFORD — ClearChoiceMD Urgent Care is set to open its 18th center statewide this summer at the Gilford Airport Plaza at 9 Old Lakeshore Road, in a stand-alone building near Gilford Cinema 8 that will mirror the company’s urgent care location in Tilton.

Construction began in March, and is expected to be finished in 70 days, in time to handle locals and vacationers who have previously flocked to emergency rooms, or driven to urgent cares in Belmont, Alton and Tilton, according to ClearChoice representatives.

“We saw there was a strong need, and want to meet tourism needs as well as community needs,” said Samantha Hosking, the company’s marketing director. “We wanted to be able to offer affordable health care options in a timely fashion. We really focus on locations that need additional access points. It made sense to expand our Lakes Region team.”

The Concord-based company, started by an emergency room physician in 2014, currently has locations throughout New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, and Massachusetts. Designed to take some of the load off emergency rooms, urgent care diverts patients with acute needs but not life-threatening conditions to less pricey stand-alone clinics that can assess and treat them more efficiently, with fewer delays and lower overhead costs.

“We’re not there to replace a PCP, who manages chronic conditions,” Hosking said. But when a health issue doesn’t require a trip to an emergency room, and a primary care provider is booked out, urgent care can fill the bill.

She said ClearChoiceMD has no current plans to close its urgent care in the Belknap Mall, which opened in 2015 and now has competition from ConvenientMD urgent care across Laconia Road.

It’s a health care sector that witnessed significant growth during COVID-19, largely through administering a high volume of COVID tests and allowing patients to wait in their parked cars until they could be seen, notified by text message. Urgent cares do not administer COVID vaccines, which are offered at drug stores and clinics run by public health officials.

According to a survey of 5,000 centers nationwide, urgent care visits jumped by 58% in 2020, with 48% from new patients. Now the centers are hoping to become the go-to option for people seeking timely care for routine, non-life threatening complaints and work-related injuries, including for those who don’t have primary care providers, according to industry leaders.

“Urgent cares have the infrastructure to deliver high-volume care and are uniquely positioned to reach rural communities, at-risk populations and young adults, which carries even greater importance during times of increased need for episodic care, like we’ve seen throughout the pandemic,” David Stern, chief executive officer of Experity, an urgent care software company, told Healthcare IT News in August.

Since the 1970s, when the first urgent care center opened in the United States, the number of facilities nationwide has ballooned to roughly 10,000. Laurel Stoimenoff, chief executive officer of Urgent Care Association, said the centers owned and operated by different companies, including American Family Care, Concentra, and NextCare, see roughly 89 million patients a year.

Urgent care visits now account for 29% of primary care visits and 15% of outpatient care, filling a niche in an overburdened health care system and providing a menu of basic services for patients who are unable to see a primary care provider or who simply don’t have one, Stoimenoff said.

That includes a robust number of millennials, demographic studies indicate. According to a 2019 health care industry survey of primary care, nearly 25% of adults born between 1981 and 1996 haven’t visited a primary care provider in five years or more. Urgent care, designed to supplement rather than substitute for primary care, is providing some of the same services on demand — including x-rays, blood tests and treatment for fractures, sprains, wounds, tick bites, poison ivy and rashes, pink eye, styes and other common, acute ailments that are not chronic or life-endangering. They’re also intend to be a much cheaper option than using an emergency department.

A 2016 study in the Annals of Emergency Medicine found that treatment in a hospital emergency room costs about 10 times the price of an urgent care visit for the same diagnosis. A study by the Urgent Care Association in 2018 found that 94% of patients waited less than 30 minutes to be seen at urgent care. Emergency room waits, in comparison, can last hours during busy times when there are lots of patients with urgent needs. 

In general, urgent care centers in New Hampshire accept a variety of insurances, including Blue Cross Blue Shield, Anthem, Aetna, Cigna, Harvard Pilgrim and Medicaid and Medicare.