Backus parent to open new clinics
Joint effort expands urgent care into area
Two new urgent care clinics are set to open, one in New London and the other in Norwich, as a joint effort between Hartford HealthCare and a Georgia-based outpatient development company extends into the southeastern part of the state.
Hartford HealthCare — the parent company for the William W. Backus Hospital — and GoHealth Urgent Care already have opened 10 clinics together in Connecticut in the past year, starting with a renovated former Rite Aid on Avon’s West Main Street in May 2017. The most recent clinic opened in Windsor on Monday.
The joint effort marks a rapid expansion of urgent care offerings in the state, and a move to diversify the health care industry away from centralized hospital care into storefronts and retail plazas.
The New London GoHealth clinic will open in the New London Mall shopping center on March 12 and the Norwich clinic will open March 19 in the Marcus Plaza on West Main Street in Norwich.
Both will be staffed by Hartford HealthCare physicians, nurse practitioners and other medical staff trained to treat patients with non-life-threatening injuries and illnesses — including the flu — and serve people looking for medical care in convenient locations and at a lower cost than what they would pay for a hospital visit.
In conjunction with the new clinics opening, Hartford HealthCare will stop providing urgent care services at offices in Montville and Norwich. It will continue to operate its urgent care facility in Colchester.
GoHealth clinics are often placed in retail locations and designed with sliding doors, front desks staffed by medical providers and large television screens that display patients’ charts in exam rooms, said Kirsten Jones, the president of the company’s Connecticut market.
GoHealth partners with health systems like Hartford HealthCare to run dozens of urgent care clinics in four states. The New London and Norwich clinics will be the company’s 11th and 12th in Connecticut, with another three on the way by the end of 2018.
“For us it’s about the patient experience,” Jones said. “It’s where patients work, it’s where they live and it’s where they play.”
The two new clinics will join a small network of urgent care and walk-in clinics in southeastern Connecticut, including an urgent care clinic in Groton and another in Norwich run by PhysicianOne, which has locations in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York.
PhysicianOne affiliated with the Yale New Haven Health system last
year, allowing the company’s medical providers to direct patients to Yale New Haven physicians and record patients treatment at the urgent care clinics in the Yale New Haven electronic medical records system.
Lawrence + Memorial Hospital, which also affiliated with Yale New Haven Health in 2016, operates walk-in clinics in Niantic, New London and Stonington.
Another company, Concentra, runs an urgent care clinic on Connecticut Avenue in Norwich that specializes in occupational medicine and treating workers comp injuries.
The GoHealth clinics in New London and Norwich will employ Hartford HealthCare doctors, and people who go there for injuries and illnesses will be entered into the Hartford HealthCare electronic records system and will be able to easily see doctors at Backus and other Hartford HealthCare offices.
GoHealth posts estimated costs for various services on its website, and people can reserve spots hours in advance of when they go to the clinic.
The clinics are open during regular business hours and are not meant to replace treatment in a hospital if a patient is having trouble breathing, having a heart attack or suffers a life-threatening injury. Staff at the urgent care clinics will call an ambulance if patients with life-threatening symptoms walk in the door.
But for patients with minor injuries, allergic reactions, rashes or sore throats, urgent care clinics can replace unnecessary trips to the emergency departments, which can rack up huge bills for patients and costs for hospitals and insurers.
“There’s certainly no secret that we know that emergency departments can be costlier to the patient,” said Rebecca Stewart, a Hartford HealthCare spokeswoman. “We’re all working together to rein in health care costs.”