From USA Today:
At his Doctors Express center in Towson, Md., Dr. Scott Burger has spent the last three years tending to the community’s night-time fevers and weekend hurts.
Now, the former emergency room physician wants to take the center’s model nationwide, doing for urgent health care what, say, Papa John’s did for pizza — making sure the public can find it anywhere and always knows what it’s going to get.
They’re hoping to open 3,000 centers around the country, at which members of the public can come in without an appointment, in the evening or on weekends when their own doctors’ offices are closed, and get stitches, something for a sore throat or even a broken bone treated for a fraction of what they’d pay for a trip to an emergency room, and without the wait.
They say they’ll differ from the roughly 8,000 other urgent-care centers, as well as smaller retail clinics that have sprung up in shopping centers in the last decade, by offering a consistent, broad range of treatment and service on the spot. Every Doctors Express will have a physician on duty at all times, unlike some centers that leave patient care to the supervision of a nurse practitioner or other professional. All will have digital X-ray equipment, a lab and a pharmacy to dispense drugs, which other urgent-care centers may not have.
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