Urgent care retailers are growing in popularity and prevalence and are part of an overall shift in the way healthcare is delivered in New York and across the country, according to an article on the NY1 website.
Accessibility is a key part of the shift.
"The attitude people have: ‘I don’t want to wait a week to see a doctor. I can’t come back next Thursday morning, I don’t have a sitter,’” Fred Hyde of Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health said in the article.
"We were actually just pretty frustrated with the delivery care model. We were in the ER, we saw patients waiting eight, nine hours for care. And there was a lot of red tape to delivering care,” said Dr. Ned Shami, City MD’s chief operating officer.
City MD will have 41 retail spaces up and running throughout New York City, including their new Medicaid friendly "Heal" locations by the end of this year, and is expected to open another 20 sites next year.
Hyde said retail chains are helping to answer some of the country's increasingly complex healthcare needs.
"They’re affordable even if you don’t have any insurance, but you have to have something when you walk in. They have no legal obligation to take care of people who are indigent. They are not equipped to take care of people with complex, urgent needs,” he said.
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