Re: “,” Oct. 31 news story.
As an emergency physician, I feel it is important to address a number of topics that were brought up in your article about a family’s surprise at being charged $8,000 for two short visits to a stand-alone emergency department.
While it is unfortunate that the Marshall family did experience such a large bill, it is important to understand why.
While many other states have free-standing ER facilities, they are relatively new to Colorado. These are not urgent-care facilities. This is the reason they are identified by the signage as emergency facilities and have an ambulance bay and helipad. These stand-alone ERs must see everyone regardless of their ability to pay by federal mandate. Urgent-care facilities are not held to this same mandate and people can be turned away if they are unable to pay. Further, these ERs are staffed by residency trained emergency medicine physicians; nurses who are experts in emergency care; paramedics; and lab and imaging technicians.
When you come to one of these ER facilities, there is the ability to perform emergent procedures, obtain imaging from ultrasound to MRI, and get lab results that are quickly processed in the facility. These are the reasons why the ER facility fee is higher than for urgent care. These fees are the same you would pay if you were seen in a hospital-based ER and you receive the very same level of quality care but with the convenience of this care occurring in your neighborhood with minimal wait time. When you arrive at these ER facilities by walking in the front door or arriving via ambulance, you will quickly receive the highest-quality care to stabilize and treat your emergent medical condition — whether that means intubating someone to help them breathe, treating a stroke, fixing a broken bone, or treating a serious infection.
While urgent-care facilities do play an important role in our current health care environment due to the shortage of primary care physicians, they are simply not able to handle the above situations because they don’t have the same resources; nor are their staffs trained to do so.
I hope this helps the public understand the important differences between ER and urgent care, as well as the important place these ER facilities have in our ever-growing communities allowing better access to emergent care when it is necessary.
Dr. Nathan Scherer practices with EPPH, a group of emergency medicine physicians, nurse practitioners and physician assistants who work in the emergency departments of Porter, Littleton, Parker and Castle Rock Adventist hospitals.
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