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All of the Henry Ford-GoHealth Urgent Care centers will use the same digital medical records system as HFH’s five hospitals, further streamlining care and routing patients to follow ups with specialty HFH doctors.
“A common DMR allows us to be more connected,” Latz said. “If a patient comes in with a cardiac issue, we have the ability to do an immediate consult with a cardiologist elsewhere from within Henry Ford. We can save time and money for the patient and connecting their care to follow up with the cardiologist before they leave the urgent care. They won’t need to go to the ER, then go to their family doctor, then get a referral. That’s the old disconnected way. We’re all a unified system.”
For HFH, it’s about infrastructure — bringing care away from its overburdened, and expensive, emergency department and funneling new patients into HFH’s specialty care system from out in the community.
Every sprain, bruise and cut doesn’t require an emergency room visit, which is even more expensive to operate than an emergency center. Tying up expensive ED resources for more minor ailments is an even greater loss leader for most hospitals.
A study from the Urgent Care Association of America found that hospital ED visits were 30 percent lower in communities with access to walk-in, no-appointment medical services at urgent care or ambulatory care centers compared with communities without those services.
Also, the cost of care for the same conditions or illnesses in hospital ERs are about 10 times as much as in urgent care.
“The goal is to get patients into a lower cost of care model,” Ditri said. “An urgent care can be staffed by a (physician’s assistant) or a (nurse practitioner). They don’t have to have a regulated set of medications available. They don’t need the rooms or the gurneys. It takes an incredible amount of money to run an emergency department. We can cover a lot of illnesses, like strep throat or an ankle sprain, in a more cost effective environment.”
And Henry Ford Health eliminates its operational risk from running urgent cares by handing the keys over to GoHealth, which manages more than 180 urgent care centers across the U.S. The JV partner handles the day-to-day operations of the centers while HFH is in charge of clinical care.
To improve margins, GoHealth shrunk the footprint of a typical urgent care center.
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GoHealth’s urgent cares range from between 2,000-square-feet and 2,400-square-feet, which is less than half the size of urgent care centers a decade of more ago, said Latz.
The Henry Ford-GoHealth Urgent Care at Seven Mile and Middlebelt roads in Livonia is tight, but not cramped. And like its counterparts elsewhere, it’s an open concept. Assistants and nurses staff two circular desks in the middle with four patient rooms lining the walls. A back room allows for laboratory testing, such as blood and COVID-19 testing. The center also has an X-ray machine.
“A tighter footprint allows us to go deeper into the community,” Latz said. “Our centers are the size of a typical Starbucks and located in the same retail environment. They are specifically designed for our workflows so we make the experience as efficient as possible.”
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