There are many reasons that people decide to go to their emergency room. Of course, it is likely that they are having some type of medical complaint, as seeking out care is the main purpose behind going to an emergency room. For a great many people, however, the medical condition at hand is not an emergent one and is far from life threatening. In fact, there are more of such people likely to be in an emergency room at any point in time than there are those who are truly in the midst of a medical crisis. But why, exactly, is this the case?

For many people, it is simply due to the fact that they are not able to get into to see their general practitioner or family doctor in any kind of timely manner. For many of these people, the doctor’s office is simply closed when the medical concern develops. In many cases, no one at that office will be able to be contacted at all – even though telemedicine has been very much on the rise, to say the very least. But for most people, it is not likely to be an option just quite yet. And even if it is, many people are simply more comfortable being assessed in person and not just over the phone, as this is not the most comforting form of getting a clean bill of health – or at least of being told that you are not in any imminent danger.

But going to an emergency room can be less than ideal for a whole host of different reasons. For one thing, the typical emergency room visit is likely to be quite steep when it comes to the price at the end of the day. Many people will visit an emergency room simply because they are legally mandated to treat everyone who comes to them for care – even those that do not have medical insurance. But for such people, going to an emergency room can be less than ideal at the end of the day, as they end up saddled with a truly massive bill and on real ways of paying it off. So while they were able to get medical care when they needed it, medical debt – sometimes even leading to the need to file for bankruptcy – is all too common all throughout the United States.

Enter the urgent care center. In recent years, urgent care centers have become more popular than ever before. As a matter of fact, the data on the subject more than backs up this claim, showing that actually as many as three million people will go to various urgent care centers over the course of the typical week, all throughout the United States. In total, there are now well over 7,000 such urgent care clinics found from one end of the country to the next, a number that is only likely to grow in the years that are to come.

And even those worried about the overall quality of urgent care treatment versus hospital treatment need not worry in the slightest. After all, the quality of urgent care medical care is high, thanks to the 20,000 doctors that are now working at various urgent care enters throughout the country. And again, the data that has been gathered on the subject more than backs this up, as it has been found that the majority of urgent care locations – more than three quarters of them, as a matter of fact – are actually able to provide both the diagnosis of and treatment for various kinds of fractures. At the end of the day, the vast majority of all urgent care centers are able to treat up to 97% of the cases that they take in. This means that less than 5% of all cases – and incredibly scant percentage indeed – will ever need to be transferred to any kind of a hospital setting. For this reason and many others, going to a local urgent care center can be a much better choice all around.