Urgent care is a growing branch of medicine that bridges the gap between a patient’s primary care physician and the Emergency Room (ER). Urgent care treats the same non-life-threatening conditions as the ER late at night and on weekends, when most doctor offices are closed.

When customers began asking how Concentra could expand our services to reach a larger population of employees and their families, we began studying the urgent care service offering. As the occupational health leader with more than 300 medical centers in 40 states across the nation, Concentra offered the medical expertise, facility infrastructure, and operational capabilities to add urgent care to our existing suite of primary care services.

Earlier this year, we launched Concentra Urgent Care at four Detroit-area locations by adding the service to existing medical center locations. Since then we have expanded the geographic footprint of this service and currently offer urgent care in five states and more than 20 medical centers nationwide. That number and reach will continue to expand as we implement our plan to offer some form of urgent care services at all our medical centers by the middle of 2008.

Concentra Urgent Care treats the wide variety of illnesses, injuries, and conditions that people routinely suffer. We also perform physical exams, diagnostic tests, and preventive screenings and offer most common vaccinations. Concentra Urgent Care strives to make health care more accessible by providing patients with extended hours* and by continually accepting more group health insurance plans.

"Urgent care is a natural way for us to expand our service offering," says W. Tom Fogarty, M.D., Concentra’s Chief Medical Officer. "After all, you treat a broken arm the same way regardless of whether the accident happened in the workplace or in your back yard. As we serve an expanded patient base, we are working hard to maintain the same high level of service that we have provided to our occupational medicine customers for over 25 years."

In areas where we provide the service, companies can take advantage of Concentra Urgent Care either by adding the service as an option to their employee benefits plan, or by publicizing the service to their employees as a fast, cost-effective alternative to the ER. In comprehensive Concentra Urgent Care facilities that are open to the general public, employees’ families can use the service as well. As part of this effort, we have analyzed and improved our operations at Concentra Medical Centers to make sure that the wait times for our occupational medicine patients are not affected.