Needing emergency care once meant a trip to the hospital, but not so much any more. Large medical operations are increasingly building emergency rooms called "urgency centers" closer to where people live and work.
The latest example is in Minnetonka, where city officials stood shoulder-to-shoulder with smiling North Memorial Health Care executives and developers last week to break ground for the Minnetonka Medical Center.
The 63,000 square-foot building will house an urgency center, which is a fully equipped emergency department staffed by board-certified emergency response physicians. It will be located along Hwy. 7 just west of Interstate 494.
Dr. J. Kevin Croston, president of outpatient services and chief medical officer at North Memorial, said the center fills a niche between more expensive hospitals that are needed for the most serious problems, and less expensive urgent care clinics that treat nonemergency ailments. It's part of a growing trend in medicine to offer a greater continuum of emergency care to help control costs and increase convenience, he said.
The center will treat people with injuries "when you know they're probably not going to have to spend a night in a hospital," Croston said. "They don't have to drive all the way to a hospital to get that care."
Those problems might include sports injuries, kidney stones, fractures, chest pain, concussions, pneumonia and abdominal pain, he said. The new urgency center will not accept ambulances, which will continue to be routed directly to the hospital, Croston said. But otherwise it will offer nearly all the services that a hospital emergency provides, he said, but at less expense.
One concern is that the public will confuse urgency centers with urgent care centers, Croston said.
"We've got to be careful that we're not driving people from the urgent care centers into the urgency rooms, because we don't want to be using an expensive way of providing care for small things like a cold or the flu or something," he said.
