In the first half of 2023, the Tomball and Magnolia area saw two urgent care centers open while construction permits have been filed with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation to bring three more urgent care and emergency clinics to the area.
Davam Urgent Care opened in the Creekside area in March, and Memorial Hermann-GoHealth Urgent Care opened in Magnolia Place in April. In addition, permits have been filed for Tomball locations of Memorial Hermann-GoHealth Urgent Care, American Family Care and Family First ER.
These centers are part of the over 3,800 urgent care centers that opened between 2018 and 2023, according to the Urgent Care Association, growing the urgent care market nationally from 10,484 centers to 14,347—a 36.8% increase.
Dr. Payman Arabzadeh—the Urgent Care Association board president, and CEO and medical director at Davam Urgent Care—said some of the conditions patients come to urgent care with include cuts, upper respiratory and sinus infections, headaches, abdominal pain, and rashes.
“Urgent care is a very vital part of medicine,” Arabzadeh said. “It’s the gap between primary care and the emergency room. It provides access when people are not able to get in to see their primary care [physician] or their condition is not life-threatening that they don’t need to to go the emergency room.”
Lessening the ER load
When it comes to urgent care’s impact on emergency rooms, a 2021 Health Services Research study titled “The impact of urgent care centers on nonemergent emergency department visits” examined data from six states from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project State Emergency Department Databases. The study found an urgent care center in a ZIP code decreased the number of emergency department visits by 17.2% for residents in that area.
“If you have a small minor cut, or a sprain or fracture, we’re able to care from here rather than having you have an increased cost and a longer length of stay as compared to the emergency room,” said Dr. Betsy Koickel, the medical director of Memorial Hermann-GoHealth Urgent Care. “We really see ourselves sitting between—a bridge, if you will—between primary care and the emergency room. We’re here to capture the in-between.”
Memorial Hermann and GoHealth Urgent Care began its partnership July 1, 2022, and has since opened 23 centers across the Greater Houston area, Koickel said.
“We really want to be where people are living their lives as the great access point for patients to get health care,” Koickel said.
And while not an urgent care center, Houston Methodist Willowbrook Hospital opened an emergency care clinic in Magnolia’s Landmark Building in February. Zachary Armitage, the emergency care center director for the Spring, Cypress and Magnolia locations, said the center also helps alleviate the patient load for emergency rooms.
“It’s great because by having these patients utilize our emergency care centers for their minor emergencies, it keeps the main emergency departments of those big hospitals less congested,” Armitage said.
Arabzadeh also said that by lessening the patient load for ERs, urgent care centers free up an ER’s resources for more critical illnesses and injuries.
“Sometimes [patients] don’t even need to be there in the ER and the hospital resources are so scarce that we will take that burden off of them,” Arabzadeh said. “And [that] not only helps them by letting them concentrate on more critical patients, we also keep the cost of the health care down by providing the services that are much more economical versus emergency rooms.”
Cost comparisons
In terms of cost, urgent care centers serve as the middle ground between primary care physicians and emergency rooms. A 2021 analysis by the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker found urgent care centers are $25 more expensive than primary care and $190 less expensive than emergency rooms for Level 1 cases, which are the least complex.
For the most complex Level 5 cases, urgent care is $26 and $435 cheaper than primary care and emergency rooms, respectively, according to the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker.
“We are a much more convenient, affordable option than an emergency department—often just a fraction of the cost of that,” Koickel said. “I think insurance companies have done that on purpose. If you don’t have a life-threatening condition, then it’s more incentivized to seek out urgent care.”
Koickel also said she expects the number of urgent care centers to continue to grow in the next five to 10 years.
“This is a viable service line in health care, so I think the demand for this type of quality care that we’re delivering is only going to increase in the future,” Koickel said.
