Urgent care has continued to grow based on its attributes of improving patients’ care experience at a lower cost than the emergency room, and by contributing to healthier populations—a triad of goals referred to as “triple aim.” Maintaining that growth may depend on outpacing other settings’ ability to change with the times. Twenty years since its inception—coinciding with urgent care’s own growth trajectory—telehealth may prove to be an invaluable tool in accomplishing that.
One operator that’s using telemedicine to realize those objectives is Doctors Care, which proved its willingness to think outside the (doc in a) box by opening South Carolina’s first urgent care organization in 1981. They’ve now used their telemedicine platform to treat patients in every county in the state—more than a thousand with their online app and nearly 6,000 using onsite technology.
Doctors Care first offered telehealth services 3 years ago, coinciding with their online check-in option. Two years later they built their own platform, called Doctors Care Anywhere, from scratch. It allows patients to connect with a physician from anywhere—an advantage in reaching patients in rural communities that may not have convenient access to walk-in centers especially. The company says it’s been useful both in providing care to patients who might not otherwise get it, but also in driving traffic to their brick-and-mortar facilities. “A major advantage we have over national telemedicine providers is we can refer complex or questionable cases to one of our 52 freestanding locations around the state,” says Thomas Gibbons, MD, president of Doctors Care. “This is a continuum of care that differentiates Doctors Care from all of our primary care and urgent care competitors in South Carolina.”