Urgent care facilities provide a wide array of basic medical services, including anonymous STD testing. If you have a problem that you need rapid treatment for, but want to avoid the costs and wait times of emergency rooms, urgent care centers can likely provide you with the care you need. Urgent care centers handle many small emergencies that require treatment, but not the full suite of medical care that emergency rooms have. About 20% of emergency room visits can be handled by an urgent care center, potentially saving patients more than $4 billion every year. A normal emergency room visit costs around $1,500, but treatment for the same conditions in an urgent care facility costs less than $150. Each year, Americans suffer from around one billion colds; imagine how much money could be saved if all of those people seeking basic treatment or flue shots just went to an urgent care clinic instead of a hospital emergency room.
Urgent care centers save money in part by using nurses and physician’s assistants, rather than doctors, for simple treatments. However, the majority of these facilities still have a doctor on staff at all times. As the urgent care movement has taken off, these facilities have begun to offer an increasingly wide range of services for more conditions, like physicals, x rays, and lab services. Anonymous STD testing is often one of these lab services. If you need something simple, like anonymous STD testing, an urgent care center is a quick and low cost way of having it done. In addition to anonymous STD testing, many other lab services are being offered by urgent care centers, including blood tests for other purposes, like insurance or employment. There are a wide range of needs that these and related tests serve. Find out more about this topic here.