Urgent Care Center Opens in Concord

Competition is considered, in most industries, a good thing. The more choices a consumer has, the better it is for them.

But when it comes to something like healthcare, there usually isn’t often competition. There’s a regional hospital with a single emergency room, maybe an insurance company or two, with a limited number of doctors available, and possibly a walk-in facility, and Concord has been no different, until now.

ConvenientMD Urgent Care is a new walk-in care facility on Loudon Road that opened this week. The privately owned, for-profit center features 12 examination rooms for customers to bring in their minor scrapes or cuts, stitches, sickness, or anything that would be handled with an emergency room or walk-in care facility.

“We do a lot of things the ED does only a lot cheaper,” said Nurse Kim Walloch. “A typical visit here might cost $250 whereas a trip to the ED would be about $3,000.”

For the most part, the company hopes to have patients treated and released in less than 45 minutes, unlike traditional emergency rooms and walk-in clinics that can take much longer. There is a doctor and nurses always on-hand, along with technicians. They also try to transport less than 1 percent of patients to another healthcare facility.

The center will take both patients with insurance and ones without. Walloch said that for most insurance customers, they would pay a traditional copay or the urgent care fee, and nothing more. The center will charge a flat $50 rate for X-Rays, regardless of how many are performed, and would not charge an extra fee to have them read by a doctor.

“We try to focus on customer service here … also affordable care,” she said. “So we feel like, those are things that Concord really needs that people might not be getting in the community right now. They might be getting one or the other but not both.”

The secret to the company’s success so far, said Max Puyanic, the CEO for ConvenientMD Urgent Care, was that ability to treat individuals quickly and keep a steady flow of customers in and out of the facility, allowing the center to treat those that have insurance coverage and those that are vulnerable to the high costs of not having coverage.

Puyanic said he decided to open the facilities in New Hampshire because the state has the third highest healthcare system in the nation, very high insurance costs, and high deductible plans. He noted that insurance companies tend to have a low profit margin whereas hospitals have higher profit margins. Puyanic added that the facility will cap costs for customers who don’t have insurance and are paying in cash, and said he hoped that the facility would assist in mending customers that need care without the long waits and expense of an emergency room. He added that the Loudon Road location seemed best for the center, since 45,000 people pass by the location every single day.

“It’s volume,” he said. “That’s how it all works … for us to survive, it’s volume.”

Currently, there is one other facility in Windham with plans for new facility in Exeter next year. There could be as many as a dozen new ConvenientMD facilities in the state when all is said and done.

Puyanic said the company would also be making donations to the community, as it has in Windham, like free flu shots, participating in healthcare fundraising walks, and free physicals for student athletes, as well as other endeavors.