SMH set to roll out Urgent Care Clinic today
Starting today, Breckenridge residents will now be able visit an urgent care medical clinic and see a doctor during the weekend without having to travel outside the city limits or go to the emergency room.
Stephens Memorial Hospital is set to launch its Urgent Care Clinic at the hospital on Saturday morning, March 17. The clinic will be open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Saturday and Sundays.
Chris Curtis, Practice Administrator for SMH, said the new clinic is a community service designed to help expand access to care and keep people from having to travel out town.
“It’s also to keep people from having to pay a high ER bill for an ear ache, sore throat or things like that. Because we do see that in the ER on the weekends,” he said. “Whereas, if they came around here (to the Urgent Care Clinic), it would be a whole lot less expensive.”
To reach the clinic, which is located inside the main hospital building, patients will enter through the front entrance of the hospital, not the emergency room entrance. During clinic hours, there will be signs posted at the entrance to the clinic and signs inside the hospital pointing to the clinic. Curtis said there will be a nurse located in the front lobby to check-in patients, file their insurance claims and take their payments.
Ashley Woodrum, a registered nurse and the hospital’s emergency room director, along with Holly Hare, also a registered nurse and the hospital’s emergency room and urgent care supervisor, will oversee the clinic’s operation. Woodrum said there will be one nurse designated to only urgent care, so they always have a nurse available at the clinic.
Once patients have been checked in up front, Woodrum said, they will bring them to the treatment room, assess them and then the physician will come in and examine them. Curtis said the majority of physicians visiting patients in the clinic will be the emergency room physicians on-call at the time.
Curtis said all payments for medical services at the clinic are required at the time of service. He said if a patient has insurance, they can make their co-payment and rest of the costs for the visit will be filed on their insurance. If, they don’t have insurance, or don’t want to file on their insurance, he said the cost will be $100 for the clinic visit, $25 extra for lab work and $50 for any radiology work.
Curtis said if, during the clinic visit, the physician determines the condition of the patient requires emergency room services instead of just a clinic visit, the patient will be transferred to the emergency room. He said in that case any payments the patient has made at the clinic would be refunded to them.
Story by Tony Pilkington/Breckenridge Texan
Cutline, top photo: Nurse Ashley Woodrum, the Emergency Room Director at Stephens Memorial Hospital, stands inside the treatment room at the hospital’s new Urgent Care Clinic. Woodrum is one of the nurses who will be staffing the new clinic when it launches on Saturday, March 17. (Photo by Tony Pilkington/Breckenridge Texan)
