SOUTHAMPTON — Cooley Dickinson Health Care officially cut the ribbon on a new urgent care facility Thursday, providing tours to attendees before the center’s anticipated summer opening.
Located next to Cooley Dickinson’s rehabilitation clinic in the Big Y Plaza on Route 10, the clinic is slated to open in either July or August after the state gives a final green light, said hospital spokeswoman Julia Sorensen.
The move is part of a trend of health care providers breaking into the urgent care market — a market that until recently had been saturated with for-profit businesses like MedExpress and ConvenientMD. One attraction for patients is that urgent care facilities are typically much cheaper than going to a hospital emergency room. This is Cooley Dickinson’s second urgent care center; the first opened in Northampton in 2016.
“This is really part of Cooley Dickinson’s commitment to meet the needs of our community,” Joanne Marqusee, president and CEO of Cooley Dickinson Health Care, said at Thursday’s open house.
“We see ourselves well beyond the hospital and we want to make care convenient to where you live, where you work, where you play,” she said.
The center will be open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. The space has six exam rooms, one X-ray room and a testing laboratory. No appointments will be necessary and the center will serve everyone above the age of 2 years old.
Officials stressed at the open house that services will be limited to non-life-threatening ailments only. In addition to occupational health services, clinic staff will diagnose and provide treatment for cold and flu symptoms; service cuts and minor lacerations; treat sore throats, viral illnesses and minor burns; and deal with sutures and suture removal, various infections, sprains and minor fractures.
Anything more serious than that warrants a trip to the emergency room, said Dr. Ray Conway, the facility’s medical director.
Conway cast the urgent care clinic as an expansion of community-based health care that patients could access with the involvement of their primary care providers.
For those whose primary care providers are part of the Cooley Dickinson system, the clinic will be able to easily access electronic medical records, he said. If a patient does not have a physician in the system, he said, a referral to an affiliated provider could be made.
“Hopefully this is going to be different than the big chain, big box urgent care centers that you drive by daily,” Conway said at the ceremony.
Sorensen said in an interview with the Gazette that the health care provider had heard from residents in the Southampton area regarding a need for convenient medical services.
“It’s really part of our constant reassessment of ‘What does the community need?’ in terms of health care services, and how can we fulfill that,” she said.
Sorensen said it was too early to speculate where Cooley Dickinson might look to open a new urgent care facility in the future. But the health care provider is not the only hospital in the region tapping into the urgent care market.
Baystate Health has six urgent care facilities, and is seeing a similar need in the area for urgent care connected with patient’s primary providers, said Dr. Brian P. Sutton, medical director of Baystate Health urgent care.
“I think it’s natural for any large hospital system to include urgent care as part of their offerings,” he said.
In addition to helping “unclog” emergency rooms with non-life-threatening injuries, hospitals with their own urgent care clinics can provide treatments that other facilities cannot, he said.
“We can access specialty care with a lot more ease than someone at a for-profit urgent care,” he said.
There’s even room for cooperation between health care providers, Sutton said. Baystate Health partners with Shields MRI to operate its urgent care facilities, he said. While Shields operates the business end, Baystate focuses on providing care.
Sorensen said the clinic was a way to bring health care closer to patients.
“You can get the care when you need it, close to home,” she said.
Michael Connors can be reached at mconnors@gazettenet.com.