Rayna Sims, Collin Krabbe, Kyle Veidt, Songxin Xie COLUMBIA, Mo.
October 13, 2016
After over 10 years working as an emergency room doctor, Eric Bettis wanted to do something different. He sought to be more hands-on with patients and to have more personal interactions with them.
Bettis opened Broadway Urgent Care in Columbia in 2011 with his partner Dr. Ross Duff. Bettis helps treat any patient who walks into his center - weekend hours and not needing to schedule an appointment are two of the biggest reasons that attract consumers to urgent care centers.
Most patients who go to an urgent care center only see the healthcare side of it: the lab coats, the doctors, the medical equipment. But the other side of urgent care centers is equally important: the money.
At the end of the day, urgent care centers are businesses that have proven quite successful, leading to an increase in urgent care centers across the nation. According to the Urgent Care Association of America, there are more than 7,000 full-service urgent care centers in the U.S.
Tom Charland is the CEO of Merchant Medicine LLC, a Minnesota-based research and management consulting firm that mainly works with clients all over the U.S. who want to open urgent care centers. According to Charland, there has been around a 10 percent increase in new centers each year. For prospective urgent care center owners, along with a desire to help their community, there is also a potential for profitability.
When Bettis and Duff started Broadway Urgent Care, they took out a loan to fund the business, but were profitable within a few months.
“When you have a business and when you're an employer, everybody else gets paid first,” Bettis said. “Within a couple months, we were able to meet everyone else’s payroll, and then we were able to slowly build up payroll for our own salaries.”
Urgent care centers make most of their money from insurance companies, but some patients occasionally pay in cash up front. Although insurance companies end up footing the bill when their clients visit urgent care centers, the companies would much rather their clients visit these centers over ERs, since a bill from an urgent care center is usually much less than a bill from an ER.
“Insurance companies are in the business of making sure their insured members get quality medical care at the lowest possible cost,” Charland said. “For someone who has a sore throat and they have strep throat, going to the ER is the highest cost and probably the wrong place for them to go and get their sore throat checked out.”
According to Charland, a main reason why urgent care centers are able to charge so much less than hospital ERs for equivalent procedures is because urgent care centers are able to pinpoint a very specific segment of care. By focusing solely on patients with less severe injuries and illnesses, urgent care centers are able to streamline their expenses and resources.
“It’s a much lower-cost staffing model,” Charland said. “If you can reach a certain threshold of patient visits at a certain net revenue per patient, you can make money.”
Contrastingly, hospitals must be equipped to handle patient cases of all severity levels. Hospitals are huge facilities that must be able to hold patients overnight for extended periods of time, deal with both intensive and outpatient care and pay a larger staff, all of which result in much higher operating costs for the hospital. Higher operating costs mean higher costs for patients and their insurance companies.
Although critics of urgent care centers point to lack of follow-up care and minimal access to patients’ medical records, people are continually choosing the quick and convenient services of urgent care centers over traditional physician practices and ERs. The high demand for urgent care centers has led to an increased number of centers in Columbia in recent years.
There are currently 10 urgent care centers in Columbia, and four of them opened in 2016. Bettis said the growing number of urgent care centers in Columbia pushes him to work even harder.
“We all want a piece of the pie,” Bettis said. “I think competition drives you to be better.”
Although Columbia might seem small for the sudden boom of urgent care centers, Bettis said the varied geographic locations of the centers help each one maintain business.
“Growth in Columbia is moving toward the north and the east,” Bettis said of why he opened a second Broadway Urgent Care location on Keene Street. “It's important to have a clinic near where the people are.”
Bettis said he hopes to continue growing his urgent care business to reach even more people in Columbia.
