Urgent Care of Jackson Hole opens its doors

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

By Jake Nichols

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Following a national health care trend that began in the early 1980s, Jackson’s second satellite medical facility will open June 1 in Smith’s Plaza. Urgent Care is a broad spectrum health care center headed by Drs. Rathna Raju and Frank Rivers. Raju comes most recently from Gillette, Wyo. where she served as an emergency medicine specialist. Dr. Rivers has operated his allergy and asthma clinic in Jackson Hole for nearly 14 years.

“[Urgent Care centers] are becoming more and more prevalent because our lives are becoming busier and busier,” Rivers said. “The old model of going to see your family doctor has become a way of the dinosaur and you’re looking at one of the dinosaurs. Only, I have decided to change with the times. Many family physicians have given up and either retired or morphed their practice into something like this.”

The 5,000-square foot facility will offer an onsite laboratory environment capable of performing basic blood work tests and a digital, x-ray machine with a real-time linkup to the radiology department at St. John’s. Raju and Rivers will share emergency room-type duties for the first year of operation. Raju then hopes to concentrate more on holistic and aesthetic medicine. Rivers will also continue seeing patients for allergy and asthma complications.

Patients of Urgent Care should enjoy significant cost savings compared with that of hospital patients. “That is where the Urgent Care is most important,” Raju said. “We can do the basic stuff at a much more reasonable price.”

“Facilities like this offer an attractive alternative to the hospital emergency department,” Rivers added. “Quite frankly, we can do everything an emergency department can do right here.” Rivers said overhead causes hospital ER departments to be inherently expensive. “It’s not the emergency department’s fault,” he said. “I’m not knocking the ER. But our cost per patient is tremendously less than it is at a hospital. That savings is passed along to the patient.”

Rivers is also confident that his new med spread, next to Quizno’s, will provide superior care than, say, crosstown rival Emerg-A-Care. “I think our services are substantially broader than that facility,” Rivers said. “Also, we are open seven days a week, holidays and all, and that’s not true over there.

And, most of the time, at Emerg-A-Care, as far as I know, it is primarily physician’s assistants that care for patients. We offer a greater level of expertise. We have two board-certified emergency medicine physicians and three board-certified physician assistants. So it’s the A-team that’s seeing patients here. We are just as experienced as many of the ER physicians at St. John’s Hospital … in fact, more experienced than most of them.”

Dr. Raju is handling most of the financial duties in launching the Urgent Care practice. She said her parents have always been business people and admits part of medicine requires business acumen. Blood, however, she knows all too well. As an ER specialist at Campbell County Memorial Hospital in Gillette, Raju has treated numerous oil and gas field traumas and was once featured on Discovery Channel’s documentary series “Trauma: Life in the E.R.” She received her medical degree from Boston University and is in the process of completing a move to Victor, Idaho with her husband, two-year-old daughter, and five adopted dogs.

Dr. Rivers was born in New Orleans and raised in Houston. He received his medical degree from the University of Texas and practiced emergency room medicine and family medicine for over 20 years in the Lone Star State. He also operated a charity clinic in Belize from 1979 to 1993. He has concentrated his efforts on an allergy practice for over a decade in the Jackson area.

For Rivers, the move to an HMO-type center was just a matter of reading the writing on the wall. “It’s been clear to me that it’s simply not economically viable to continue a private practice,” he said. “And one big reason is that, in Wyoming, Wyoming Legislature has allowed nurses to prescribe medications and essentially function as physicians. Now, I’m not going to argue the merits of that, but the fact is patients no longer have to see an M.D. or a D.O. [Osteopathic Doctor] to obtain prescriptions.”
Rivers also cites today’s active lifestyles and busy schedules as reasons for the demise of traditional primary care doctors operating out of their own family practice office.

“The world of medicine is changing,” he said. “In ten years, you’ll have HMOs in the cities and fewer and fewer physicians who are struggling in their office practices. You’re going to have primary care medicine provided by nurses. And you’re going to have places like Urgent Care centers becoming the norm.”

Urgent Care will operate every day, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and weekends, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. No appointments are necessary. The staff is bilingual.

Photo by Andrew Wyatt
Dr. Rathna Raju will operate Urgent Care of Jackson Hole with Dr. Frank Rivers in the Smith's Plaza.

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Urgent Care of Jackson Hole opens its doors | Planet JH News Article: General Health And Fitness

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