However, in recent years, local hospitals have started filling the gaps in health care access in growing and underserved parts of Montgomery County by creating satellite primary care offices and partnering with urgent care clinics.
According to the Lake Conroe Area Forecast 2018 study by the urban planning firm Community Development Strategies, the population of the Lake Conroe area—which includes Conroe, Montgomery and Willis—is anticipated to increase by 66,190 residents by 2027.
CRMC Chief Medical Officer Lawrence Verfurth said accessibility to primary health care will become more important as the population grows. Verfurth said urgent care clinics and standalone emergency rooms also help meet the health care needs in rural Montgomery County.
“We have noticed in the rural areas [of Montgomery County] that there’s a lack of primary care,” Verfurth said. “When there are no physicians in the area, people come to the hospital … so it helps us by having other urgent cares in the area because they kind of unload [our emergency room].”
Certain portions of Montgomery County, in fact, are designated as medically underserved areas—which have too few primary care providers, high infant mortality rates, high poverty and/or high elderly populations, according to the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration.
Those areas include west of FM 149 in Montgomery as well as areas north of FM 1097 and south of FM 2854.
Jane Bolin, a professor at Texas A&M University’s Health Science Center and an expert on rural health care, said rural areas are among the most vulnerable in the health care system due to lack of Medicaid coverage and poor access to affordable health care.
“You may or may not have a hospital, you may or may not have a clinic, and it may take you up to an hour to receive emergency care or get into your doctor or to receive usual preventive care,” Bolin said.
Making Primary Care Convienent
Regional hospitals that have recently extended their health care services to Lake Conroe area residents include CRMC, Houston Methodist The Woodlands Hospital and CHI St. Luke’s Health The Woodlands.
In 2014, HCA Healthcare—of which CRMC is a subsidiary—purchased Dallas-based urgent care company CareNow Urgent Care. In the last year, two CareNow Urgent Care clinics have opened in Conroe and Montgomery: one in September on Hwy. 105 in Montgomery and another in January off West Dallas Street in Conroe.
CRMC Chief Operating Officer Reed Hammond said health care must meet the needs of population growth by improving medical procedures and making health care more accessible.
“We do try to take primary care to the communities, because in today’s world, people are about convenience,” he said. “They expect that you’re going to provide high-quality, cost-effective health care.”
Will Howorth, vice president of strategic business growth for CareNow Urgent Care, said urgent care clinics take care of patients in rural Montgomery County. The new Montgomery clinic on Hwy. 105 not only provides access to primary care physicians seven days a week, but treats nonlife-threatening emergencies and illnesses and offers laboratory services, X-rays and immunizations.
“What we’re trying to provide with [CareNow Urgent Care] is the front gate for services to a larger health care environment/ecosystem,” Howorth said. “We focus on markets where we have a breadth scope of health care services like we do at Conroe Regional to build out urgent care clinics.”
Shannan Reid, director of the Montgomery Economic Development Corporation said the Montgomery health care scene is slowly growing, pointing to CareNow opening and Houston Methodist Primary Care Group relocating to Heritage Place II, a medical office building in downtown Montgomery, in early 2018.
“They now have a place for the specialists to do a circuit in our community so that all of those specialty needs can be addressed by Houston Methodist right here in our neighborhood,” Reid said. “So while it’s not a full-fledged hospital, a lot more services are able to rotate through our area.”
Stephen Spielman, president of Houston Methodist Primary Care Group, said he believes bringing primary care to communities is the best way to ensure the population’s health.
“Bringing primary care services to patients wherever they are and removing barriers to access ensures that patients can be proactive in maintaining their health and engaged in their wellness journey,” Spielman said.
EMS expansions
The Montgomery County Hospital District provides emergency response services to all areas of the county, including unincorporated and rural areas. According to MCHD statistics, the average transportation time from a call in Montgomery County to the respective hospital is 30 minutes. Travel time can be as long as 57 minutes or as short as 8 minutes.
There are currently 23 MCHD stations across Montgomery County, with eight more stations planned to debut over the next five years, MCHD Chief Operational Officer Melissa Miller said.
The MCHD has opened four stations in the last five years, investing roughly $2.2 million to open the stations and service the county’s underserved areas, according to MCHD officials. Of those four new stations, three of them are in the Conroe and Montgomery area.
Director of EMS Jared Cosper said stations were built on Hwy. 105 to improve coverage between Conroe and Montgomery and on League Line Road to improve coverage between north Conroe and Willis. He said the district is often challenged with providing services to rural areas of Montgomery County, like the Sam Houston National Forest, due to road quality and distance from area hospitals.
“The difficulty is finding an optimal location to place an EMS station or units when a relatively small number of emergencies occur across a large geographic area,” Cosper said. “The simple truth is that our existing roadways don’t always get us where we’d like to be as quickly as we need.”
Traffic congestion and signal delays in densely populated areas of the county also bring their own challenges for emergency responders, Cosper said. On a monthly basis, the majority of MCHD patients are transported to CRMC, which is a Level II trauma center, Cosper said.
CRMC works closely with MCHD to make sure the district can meet the needs of residents in Montgomery County’s rural areas, Hammond said.
“[CRMC] partners with our EMS agencies in the outlying areas … to ensure that if they don’t have a resource or a facility to take their patients to, we’re able to meet the needs of the patients they’re seeing in the field,” he said.
