What is a Free-Standing Emergency Room like FRONTLINE ER, and how does it differ from an Urgent Care?
A free-standing emergency room is a stand-alone emergency care center that offers a patient what they would expect from their local hospital emergency room. FRONTLINE ER is open 24 hours a day with an in-house board-certified emergency physician, an emergency-trained registered nurse and a radiology technologist. These facilities, such as FRONTLINE ER offer on-site laboratory services as well as radiological imaging studies which include both x-rays, ultrasound, and a CT scanner all being read in real-time by a radiologist. Therefore, we have the capability to take care of your emergencies such as lacerations, injuries, broken bones and of course when a patient is in pain both treat it with medication, and determine the cause of that pain. In this sense we differ from an urgent care or also known as a walk-in clinic which usually has fixed hours of operation with limited on-site testing as well as limited x-ray capabilities on site.
The urgent care facilities due to their limitations will often send patients that require more extensive treatment to an emergency room such as FRONTLINE ER. Since free-standing emergency facilities have dedicated lab and x-ray and do not accept ambulance patients we differ from hospital-based emergency rooms in the fact that we have much shorter or no wait times to be seen, evaluated and treated, as most patient will have a length of stay of an hour or less. When a patient needs admission to the hospital we will call and have the patient admitted directly to a hospital room and we will have spoken with the doctor that will be treating the patient prior to their arrival. Also, when discharged from a free-standing emergency room patients will be given copies of all their studies so that their doctor will be able to review them again at a follow-up visit with them.
