A new urgent care clinic opening Wednesday in City Centre will not only be state-the-art but be a true revolution in how health care is provided, according to its top executives, Mark Celmer and Melissa Marsocci.
"This is a health care delivery model that doesn't exist, to my knowledge, anywhere in the country," said Celmer, who is president of Buffalo-based Insource Healthcare Solutions. "We coordinate health care back to pediatricians, specialists, primary care physicians. We have advanced telemedicine which is state-of-the-art. We can get patients seen faster and with more related services than anybody short of the Cleveland Clinic."
For years, Insource has developed urgent care facilities for the owner of multiple urgent care centers, but Marsocci said Insource had its own vision about how to provide health care and decided to start opening its own urgent care units.
Batavia is the first of four locations being opened in New York and Pennsylvania over the next two months.
The clinic is between Genesee Dental and Steve Hawley's insurance office. It's a location used for a long time by DENT Neurological Institute, which will continue to rent office space there.
Insource is not coming to town to compete with any existing physicians or the hospital, said Marsocci, who grew up in Le Roy and lives in Batavia.
"We're not going to steal anybody's patients," she said.
Following a patient's visit to Insource, the patient will be referred back to his or her primary care physician or the appropriate specialist with all of the patient's records shared with that doctor.
For patients, the wait time to see a medical care professional will be less than 15 minutes and most patients will be in and out of the clinic within an hour.
Typically, when a patient visits an urgent care clinic, once they're taken into an exam room, they "own that exam room," Marsocci said. At Insource, the patient will be given an exam and then wait in a "results waiting room," which has comfortable chairs and a TV. That frees up the exam room for other patients.
Celmer and Marsocci are particularly excited about the telemedicine model they've developed.
Here's how Marsocci described it:
Let's say you came in and you had a fractured hand. We can certainly treat that, but upon a view of your X-ray, it looks pretty severe. We say, "this looks serious, so let's get a second opinion from an orthopedic." Maybe you need some screws in it. Maybe it needs immediate attention, maybe not. You come into the telemedicine room and the orthopedic comes in on that flat screen.
He can talk to you and you can talk to him. He might ask the provider to move your hand around and at the same time we can push that X-ray through to him.
We just lowered your cost of care because typically you would have gone to that orthopedic and he would have redone your X-ray, also exposing you to radiation. Now it's just one X-ray.
A consulting physician can dial into the telemedicine center through a secure line using a desktop, laptop or even an iPad or smartphone.
Even if a doctor is away from his office -- maybe on the golf course -- he can use an app to consult with a patient in the telemedicine room.
The quality of the pictures sent to the doctor is amazingly accurate and detailed, Marsocci said.
Insource has hired six full-time employees and all of them live in Genesee County.
With a range of specialists sharing the Insource space -- including neurologists, orthopedics, pediatricians, cardiologist and urologists -- Calmer and Marsocci say the concept will do a lot to reduce the cost of medical care.
One insurance company is so excited by the idea, Marsocci said, thet they want to see more Insource clinics built in Pennsylvania.
For patients who must pay for services with cash or credit card, they will find a visit to Insource a lot less expensive than going to the emegency room. An ER visit can run into the thousands of dollars, but a typical visit to Insource will cost about $180.
Using technology, there will even be cases where patients can save on super expensive ambulance rides to a hospital in Rochester and Buffalo, if that's needed. If the patient doesn't need to be on an ambulance, but still needs to be monitored while by driven to the hospital by a family or friend, Insource can provide the patient with an iPad to monitor his or her condition during the ride.
Insource also plans to set up a telemedicine center at the county nursing home, which will save the county money on providing medical care to patients there.
"These are common sense approaches to reforming health care instead of doing things that don't make sense," Marsocci said.
