ImmediCenter opened on June 4, 1984 across the street from the present Clifton location. It was the brainchild Dr. Stephen LaPoff, Dr. Dan T. Bernheim and me. My two original partners are deceased. At the time, urgent care was a novel concept. We were the first urgent care center in this part of NJ. Dr. LaPoff was from Clifton and grew up literally around the corner from the original location.

We were unsure how well the concept would be accepted by the community, but we grew by leaps and bounds from day one. It was clear that the patients in the area wanted and needed our services.

In those days it was rare for doctors to be concerned with the convenience of the patient. Prior to urgent care centers, the hours and days doctors worked, and the limited available appointments suited the physician’s need and barely considered the patients’ needs or wants.

A lot has changed since then, since urgent care has become more commonplace. Our involvement in hospitals and in the medical community is welcome, and many doctors have tried to affiliate with us in any way possible.

With our rapid and solid success, we opened a second center 2 years later in the neighboring community of Bloomfield.

Years later we took over a failing urgent care center in Totowa and converted it to a successful practice by indoctrinating this facility with the ImmediCenter staff and philosophies. It has also grown steadily under the superb direction of our newest partner, Dr. Scott Coleman.

Our transition from being purely a walk-in center for episodic illnesses and injuries into a comprehensive full-service primary care office was a result of patient demand. We initially opened to serve only as an urgent care center, and sought to refer out the more chronic conditions, like high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol levels and diabetes to the doctors in the community.

Our patients requested that we take them on as regular patients for these chronic conditions because we were so convenient, we truly cared and listened to our patients, and our fees were similar to what the other doctors in the community were charging. We agreed, and now our patient mix is about 50% urgent care type visits and the rest is ongoing primary care. Who said doctors don’t listen to their patients? We certainly did and still do.

Hospitals soon realized that urgent care medicine was here to stay. These centers did take much activity away from the emergency rooms, and rightfully so.

Hospitals responded with their own creation, which was called Fast Track, which still exists in many hospital emergency rooms. What Fast Track is, is diverting non-emergencies from the ER to a different facility within the hospital. They set up a separate area staffed with a medical team distinct from the ER and handled patients like an urgent care center. It cut down on the patient’s waiting time, but it did not reduce costs at all.

Most urgent care centers consider themselves as primary care offices, so charges and co-pays are more in line with a primary care office than with an expensive emergency room, or Fast Track for that matter. Insurance companies rarely deny payment to an urgent care center for these types of visits. Our fees are typically 20% -50% less than a comparable visit to the emergency room.

Urgent care centers are not all alike. While our facilities offer standard episodic, non-emergency care, we emphasize the primary care aspect of medicine and encourage our patients to think of us also as their family doctor.

Since patients already enjoy our expanded hours and walk-in philosophy, it is only logical to continue to use us as their primary care doctor. All our physicians are family practitioners or general internists. We provide the same care and practice to same standards as the primary care physicians do in our community.

Our fees our commensurate with the primary care fees in the area, which are substantially lower than the emergency room’s. We, of course, do not encourage people to use the emergency room for routine care, but that has been the nature of the ER prior to urgent care’s creation.

ImmediCenter offers some services not commonly seen in other urgent care centers, such as orthopedics, gastroenterology, pain management and cosmetic procedures such as hair removal with intense pulse light, which is safer than laser treatments.

Urgent care centers fill a much-needed void between the traditional doctor’s office and the emergency room. The community continues to endorse their existence and encourages their continuation. These centers are often used as one’s primary care provider.