Sense of urgency

Urgent-care facilities in Glendale and Burbank are trying to draw on the growing totals of patients who don’t have health insurance and end up pursuing routine treatments at already strained hospital emergency rooms.

The facilities provide treatments for minor fractures, colds, infections and other maladies that might otherwise be dealt with in a doctor’s office. But they don’t require appointments and offer extended hours to be comparable substitutes for emergency rooms, providers said.

Urgent-care centers are also as little as one-fourth the cost of a hospital emergency room, a factor that health professionals have used to help encourage patients to consider the facilities as alternatives, they said.

But even as medical experts have become more focused on efforts to cut the nation’s health-care costs, with the heavy expenses of emergency room resources and staffs coming under the microscope, persuading more patients to explore other treatment options has not been easy, they said.

“We know that the population is still growing, that [emergency rooms] continue to be overwhelmed, and urgent-care centers are much less expensive facilities,” said Jason Toth, medical director at Burbank Occupational Health Center, which offers urgent-care treatments.

Increasing consumer interest in savings has prompted urgent-care centers to increase their role in the marketplace.

Burbank Occupational Health Center, where 25% of its operations are in urgent care, plans to expand its treatment and outreach efforts this year, Toth said.

Verdugo Hills Medical Associates in Glendale, which recently joined the Urgent Care Assn. of America in an attempt to build more awareness for the quality of its treatment, was able to draw on enough frugal patients to make 2009 its best year since it opened in 1984, said Richard Foullon, medical director of the center.

“It is just, I think, an obvious alternative to the high price of an emergency department,” Foullon said.

Still, even as more patients explore urgent care as an inexpensive alternative, health professionals face an uphill battle in convincing patients to choose the centers over Los Angeles-area hospitals that have become increasingly burdened with emergency requests, said Robert Tranquada, professor emeritus at the USC Keck School of Medicine.