ER physician puts skills to work as Urgency Room leader in pandemic

Urgency Room medical director Dr. Craig Matticks has helped lead the recovery of the group of three hybrid urgent care-emergency departments, which adapted to offer COVID-19 testing and telemedicine visits after patient volumes dropped sharply amid the pandemic hit.

Matticks, an emergency-room physician for 26 years, joined the Urgency Room in April, as people heeded advice to put off care unless they were seriously ill to reduce the risk of coronavirus infection. The Urgency Room, launched in 2010, has sites in the Eagan, Woodbury and Vadnais Heights.

"The first few months that I was in charge I was presiding over a 50% drop in our patient volumes," Matticks said. "We saw the bottom drop out of our business model."

Volume began rebounding in June when the Urgency Room became the only site in the state offering access to a rapid COVID-19 test, Matticks said. The Urgency Room since has done some 30,000 COVID tests.

This test, a molecular one from Abbott Laboratories, was in high demand because it produces results in 20 minutes instead of days, Matticks said. The Urgency Room had an advantage because it already used the Abbott module needed to process COVID tests to handle tests for illnesses including strep throat.

A lab manager recognized the opportunity to expand testing and the Urgency Room bought more testing modules and contracted for testing kits.

The COVID testing first took place only in Woodbury and was restricted to an outside location, Matticks said. The next phase involved making adaptations to do testing safely indoors at all three sites.

The Emergency Physicians Professional Association, whose members work in hospital emergency rooms in the Twin Cities, owns and operates the Urgency Room sites.

Q: How has your emergency medicine experience helped in adapting the Urgency Room to the pandemic?

A: We are used to operating with less-than-ideal information and having to make decisions in a relative short period of time. I don't know if that suited us to managing the changes that we had make in the pandemic but it certainly didn't hurt.

Q: Will the Urgency Room open new sites at some point?

A: Many people have figured out what urgent care can do. What's been harder is figuring out what a hybrid urgent care-emergency room can do. Having only three sites in the metro makes it harder to have a marketwide marketing campaign to educate people on that. There are financial and political decisions that go into how and when we expand and who might partner for us. We're exploring all those options.

A: I saw it as an opportunity to do both clinical medicine and procedural medicine. I chose to practice at North Memorial in particular coming out of residency because I wanted to be in a hospital that served an impoverished community. It was important to be part of that solution. And I didn't like carrying a beeper. When you're in the emergency room you have a shift and when you're done, you're essentially done. You might work really hard when you're there but when you're off you're off. That had its appeal.