By Andrea Sachs

I can remember, before the pandemic, when a few tissues didn’t constitute a five-alarm fire. As a matter of fact, you would have been judged a shirker for staying home in the face of an impending work deadline. In my magazine office, people routinely showed up sniffling. (Soon, their colleagues were sniffling, too.) Now, in the Age of COVID, the rules have changed. Nobody wants you around.

A few days ago, I woke up with a sore throat. I immediately started to catastrophize about having COVID. A home test said no. But soon, I was congested, too.

Damn! Who has the time and energy to run over to the internist’s office on the East Side? Who wants to infect everyone on the bus? Who wants to pay a fortune for a cab? Who wants to wait hours in a crowded waiting room?

A shimmering image of the urgent care center on a nearby corner came to mind. Surely, they were up to a medical emergency of this magnitude. For the first time, I decided to eschew (achoo?) my internist’s office and head over.

Obviously, I’m not a doctor, so I can’t judge my urgent-care experience with an expert’s eye. I’m not professionally qualified to promote or endorse a medical facility, or for that matter, pan it. For that reason, I’ve decided not to name the urgent-care facilities discussed in this story. Still, I am certainly a battle-scarred patient with a basis for comparison. 

I’ve been late to the urgent-care scene. I guess I thought of them as more contagious and — let’s face it — dirtier than my own doctor’s office.

But miracle of miracles! Nothing could have been further from the truth. The urgent care center in question was spick-and-span clean and brightly lit. And they called my name in five minutes. FIVE! Inside was equally efficient. A pleasant young nurse took my vitals, and then a slew of tests. Remember when a cold was just a cold? Now, they have to rule out everything but Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. I’m ready: Bring on the Covid test. Strep test. Flu test.

“A shimmering image of the urgent care center on a nearby corner came to mind.”

Two minutes later — TWO! — a cheery, masked, veteran ER doctor came into the room and told me all of my tests were negative. He poked and prodded the same way as my internist normally does, then delivered his verdict verbally and on paper. “An acute upper respiratory infection. Symptoms suggestive of viral communicable illness.” What, in the old days, used to be called a bad cold.

The doctor gave me suggestions for various over-the-counter meds and lifestyle adjustments. If I get worse, come back, or if it’s dire, go to the emergency room.

Smiles. Pleasantries. No charge because of my insurance. Back on the street in less time than it would have taken me to get across town. Why did it take me so long to figure this out? I found myself thinking of the wasted hours I have spent cooling my heels waiting for doctors who were running ridiculously late.

Being a determined (albeit congested) journo, I had to dig deeper. I found that urgent care centers arrived with a thud in the U.S. during the 1970s, when they were derisively called “docs in a box.” Although their growth was initially slow, they caught on and multiplied because of the convenience they offered, in contrast with the long waits for primary care.

The pandemic catapulted urgent care into a thriving industry. (Fittingly, the first case of COVID was diagnosed in a Snohomish, Washington urgent care center.) Remember how panicked people in New York City (me!) were at the beginning of the pandemic, when going to a hospital ER was inadvisable? As the Urgent Care Association (UCA), an industry group, puts it onits website, “When patients had nowhere else to turn, urgent care centers and staff were on the frontlines of evaluating, diagnosing, and eventually testing and treating these patients.”

As a result, the number of centers has grown at a strong pace: more than 25% from 2019 to last year. There are currently more than 14,000 urgent care centers in the U.S, double the number in 2014. The younger you are, the more likely you are to have visited one — Gen Z and Millennial consumers use them at almost twice the rate of Boomers and those older. The future for the industry looks rosy: according to the UCA, the growth rate for new centers is seven percent a year.

Unsurprisingly, New York has kept pace with the national trend. Statewide, there are 843 care centers, ranking in number only behind California, Texas, and Florida. And here on the UWS, urgent care centers have become so popular that there is even a Yelp list of the Top 10 urgent cares near the neighborhood.

“The pandemic catapulted urgent care into a thriving industry.”

Urgent care has caught on in the neighborhood, I think, because, at its best, it is a good fit with a fast-paced urban lifestyle: Close by. No appointment needed. Typically, open every day of the week for long hours. Faster and cheaper than the emergency room.

Sounds Utopian, right? A born skeptic, I had to make sure that I hadn’t had a million-in-one experience. So, I started contacting other people in the neighborhood and asking what their experiences had been like at different UWS urgent care centers. I came back with reactions that ran the gamut: positive, negative, and in-between.

Andres Ramirez, a doorman in an UWS apartment building, was a definite no vote. Two years ago, during the pandemic, he said, he had gone to an UWS urgent care center, where “they told me they would take my insurance.” But weeks later, he said, he received a $200 bill from a collection agency. “Of course, I was upset. They never even called me. I ended up paying out of my own pocket. Never again.”

Megan Rutherford, a retired journalist who lives on the UWS, had the opposite reaction. The first time she went to an urgent care facility was because her heart was racing. “I didn’t think it was anything important,” she says now. But the people at the center who saw her sure did. “They said, “you need to go to the emergency room,” she recalls. “They called an ambulance. They wouldn’t even let me go home for my toothbrush. I ended up having an ablation [a treatment for an irregular heartbeat known as an arrhythmia] in the middle of the night.”

Doug Dworkin, a retired consultant who also lives locally had mixed experiences with three urgent care centers. “One on the west side was okay, but they gave me the wrong antibiotic for cellulitis.” He later went to a Midtown urgent care center, and they remedied the problem. More recently, on a Saturday night, Dworkin’s wife thought she broke her wrist and the couple went to a second UWS urgent care. Says Dworkin, “When they x-rayed it, they said, ‘you need to see a specialist.” Meanwhile, they gave her something for the pain and splinted the wrist. “They did the right thing,” he says. He gives the facility high marks, especially since they called his wife back the next day to rewrap her wrist until she could get to the specialist. “We didn’t need to go to the internist. She was seen in five minutes. You’re not going to get in to see an internist that fast.”

“It is a good fit with a fast-paced urban lifestyle.”

The last stop on my telephone research rounds was a phone call to Dr. Dmitry Volfson, the chief medical officer for CityMD. With 180 centers, it is one of the largest urgent care operators in the country. Prominent in the northeast, the company got its start in the city in 2010, with two of its first four facilities on the UWS.

Dr. Volfson, who continues to see patients one day a week at different CityMD sites, says he has “worked many, many shifts at the West 57th and West 88th Street locations over the last 10 years.” Each of his company’s four UWS locations “has its own flavor,” he observes. Further south, they see many tourists from around the world, and lot of folks from Broadway. Further north, the patient population is more residential, with more families.

The most common patient problem, he says, is exactly what drew me in: upper respiratory infections, like colds, flu, and COVID. Other typical concerns? Cuts, sprains and injuries needing an x-ray. When the circumstances are outside their range of services, patients are guided to appropriate hospitals and outpatient specialists. “It’s our job to point them in the right direction,” he says.

And yes — they take almost every type of insurance. However, he adds, many people are surprised to learn after their visits that they have high-deductible insurance policies. “We have no way of knowing that they’re going to get a bill afterwards. It has nothing to do with [us].” (Perhaps that’s what happened to Andres the doorman.)

Enough snooping for now! I still have reporting calls out to a myriad of other UWS urgent-care execs, whom I should be hearing back from soon. I am also eager to hear readers’ urgent-care experiences. Thumbs up or down? In a second installment or update, I’ll cover other local providers and report my findings.

Hopefully, that won’t be from a sickbed. In the meantime, pass the tissues, please!

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