Dr. Alan Dennington co-owns Better Faster Urgent Care with his wife, Dr. Kristina Dennington.[/caption]

For anyone who has a minor health emergency in the Southlake area, Better Faster Urgent Care is a place to turn for help.

Since Sept. 1, 2014, BFUC has been bandaging and caring for the area’s residents.

Dr. Alan Dennington co-owns BFUC with his wife, Dr. Kristina Dennington. He said he was inspired to open the facility during his time working in the emergency room at Baylor Regional Medical Center at Grapevine as he would see patients who came in from urgent care centers.

“I thought there were a lot of procedures and other things that we would do at the bedside in the emergency room that could be done in these [urgent care] clinics,” he said.

He said he also wanted to help patients have a more affordable option for their care than if they were to visit the emergency room.

Although the cost of being treated at an urgent care center depends on the type of insurance patients have, it generally falls somewhere between the cost of a general practice provider and an emergency room, Dennington said.

“If you have a sinus infection or other things like that, the urgent care price point is a lot more fair and reasonable [than ER prices],” he said.

Better Faster Urgent Care has equipment that allows staff to perform a variety of tests.[/caption]

The facility accepts all major insurances such as Medicare and Tricare.

In addition to trying to keep prices reasonable, the staff at the center tries to ensure the patients are seen as quickly as possible, within 10 minutes being the average wait time. Patients can be seen within a minute, he said.

Once they are brought back to one of the eight patient rooms, the advanced practice providers can handle a variety of medical issues. The urgent care maintains a Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments-certified laboratory that is capable of running tests that range from strep, blood sugar and pregnancy tests to liver function tests and cardiac enzyme tests.

“Most urgent care centers focus on just doing waived tests, which mean the tests don’t require a lot of certification, monitoring or upkeep to perform,” he said.

The urgent care center does everything short of treating issues that require hospitalization or anything beyond minor surgical procedures. If patients come in with an issue that is beyond the center’s scope, Dennington said he and the other providers will send them to an emergency room.

Patients are seen in one of the facility’s eight patient rooms often within 10 minutes.[/caption]

“We have patients who come routinely—recurring patients—a lot of times they come in … for us to help them manage their high blood pressure or check up on their cholesterol or do other kinds of routine things,” he said.

Despite the clinic seeing the standard growth he said he would expect, Dennington said he still thinks the urgent care center is relatively unknown in the community.

“We’re still trying to grow more,” he said. “You know, I still find that even after a year of being open, there’s a lot of people in the community, both in Grapevine and Southlake, that don’t know that we’re here yet or just found out about us.”

Dennington said BFUC might consider extending its hours in the future. For now the facility is open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday and from noon to 8 p.m. on Sundays. Those hours give patients the chance to come in after most general practice offices close for the night or the weekend.