Fast-track to Specialty Care
We’ve all sat in the waiting room of an ER...
Waiting...
And waiting....
And waiting longer...
Just when you think it’s time to be called back, a more urgent emergency gets triaged in front of you resulting in the typical ER visit of over three hours and a bill costing thousands of dollars.
What if there was a better option?
If you’re in need of urgent orthopedic care, there is.
Northwest Orthopedic Express (formerly OrthoCare Express)
Northwest Orthopedic Specialists began Northwest Orthopedic Express in 2017 to meet the needs of our patients. We found that Mondays were the busiest clinic day —often due to injuries over the weekend or after hours that required an ER visit or a referral to our office from an urgent care clinic.
Patients referred to us from ERs and urgent care clinics arrived splinted and wrapped and needed a more detailed exam and treatment from one of our providers. Unfortunately, these patients had just incurred a long wait and an expensive ER bill to get a simple referral.
Skip the Middleman
We knew we could do better, so along came Northwest Orthopedic Express. Now, patients can be seen quickly until 7pm Monday through Friday. Monday has extended hours from 10am-7pm and Tuesday-Friday hours are 3-7pm. Being open until 7pm gives parents time to get home from work and get kids to the orthopedist with no trip to the ER for standard orthopedic injuries such as sprains, strains and fractures.
The average cost of an orthopedic visit to Northwest Orthopedic Express is less than a third the cost of an ER visit.
In, Out, and On Their Way
Mike Burns, a Spokane-area resident visited the Express clinic multiple times. When his 7-year-old daughter broke her arm, she was in an exam room, seen by a provider, X-rayed and casted (in hot pink!) in 55 minutes. Later, he took his older daughter there when she broke her toe and had a similar experience. Mike noted that the second visit was slightly longer because the break happened near a growth plate but he was happy that the Northwest Orthopedic Express team took extra care treating this critical area. He noted that the office was, “Clean, efficient and extremely well done.” Scheduling follow-up care was seamless.
With quick visits such as these, patients are likely to be in and out of our clinic before they would have ever been called back from the waiting room in the ER.
Besides speed and cost, the benefit of being seen in a specialty clinic is essential. Patients who visit the Express clinic are often seen by a specialist two days faster than had they gone through a referral from the ER.1
Visit Us
Through Northwest Orthopedic Express, we strive to reduce healthcare costs to our patients, reduce wait and visit times, and have them seen by a specialist quickly. The orthopedic walk-in clinic is at our Spokane Valley office near Valley Hospital with quick access from I-90 off the Pines exit.
1. Althausen, P. L., MD, MBA, & Mead, L., MBA. (2016, December). The Role of Dedicated Musculoskeletal Urgent Care Centers Journal of Orthopaedic Trauma. https://bit.ly/2MxA8ss, Wolters Kluwer