Health First physician transforms urgent care
Former helicopter flight physician Dr. Mike Shapiro has helped Health First transform emergency care through the creation of Health First Now.
Urgent care facilities have popped up in every community as an alternative to emergency rooms, enabling patients to get timely basic medical care on a walk-in basis.
The four centers under Health First Now, formed in 2010, are different from other urgent-care facilities in the quality of training and staffing and technology sometimes available through Health First facilities, he said.
"Probably 80 percent of the patients who go to the emergency rooms don't need to be treated in the emergency room," he said. "For things such as abdominal pain, where you have to do some tests, there just never was a good alternative outside the emergency room."
Nationally, only about 20 percent of the patients who show up in the emergency room are admitted to the hospital, he said.
"For most of those patients who don't need to be admitted, they can be treated outside the ER in a place that's more convenient, more familiar and we actually get to know some of these patients," he said.
Shapiro talked about how urgent care fits into the health-care system for the future to the benefit of patients.
Q:
What are good qualities for emergency room physicians?
Shapiro:
I think being able to multi-task. We don't have the luxury that most doctors have of having appointments coming in every 15 minutes and they know what's coming in and can schedule it. Here, anybody can walk in with anything anytime and you can't just take of one patient and get them all tucked away and go on to the next. You have to juggle.
I always tell people it's like being an air-traffic controller and you've got all these airplanes up in the air and you've got to get them all down before you run out of gas and you can't forget one.
You also have to be decisive. You don't have the luxury of going home and thinking about it. You have to make your decision, go with it and then reassess whether you made the right decision or not or if you need to stick with it.
Q:
Would you consider emergency care as a dynamic field in terms of innovation?
Shapiro:
Some things have stayed the same and other things are much different. The treatment of heart attacks has become much different because pharmaceutical technology and the ability to put stints in on an emergency basis has changed over the years. Also, CT scans provide so much more information. It's really changed the way we practice. Nowadays, diagnosing a kidney stone or determining if somebody is having a appendicitis is a piece of cake.
Q:
What has been the response to Health First Now?
Shapiro:
It's been tremendous. We see close to 80 patients per day. When we first started, we weren't sure if anybody would show up and then on the very first day we opened, we had 27 patients. We now have a second location in Malabar next to Palm Bay Hospital.
Q:
How do your facilities compare with other urgent care facilities in the area?
Shapiro:
Most of the other urgent care are free-standing. The advantage we have is the shared electronic medical records that offer all kinds of advantage to us to take of the patient and for quality and safety. The vast majority of tests we can do here, but sometimes the patients have insurance requirements where they have to go somewhere else.
Q:
What is your favorite part of your job?
Shapiro:
It's the ability to have people coming in with acute problems and being able to address it and oftentimes obtaining a result that helps them out very quickly. It could be minutes or a day or two, but you get instant feedback.
Q:
What is difficult?
Shapiro:
It's the ability to multitask in an uncontrolled environment and trying not to drop the ball. In the ER, the hardest thing you deal with is the social problems like alcohol and drug abuse and there's a lot sadness in the ER with trauma.
Mike Shapiro, 54, emergency medicine, medical director for Health First Now Urgent Care
Hometown:
Philadelphia; raised in Watchung, N.J.
City of residence:
Indian Harbour Beach
Family:
Wife, Shery; daughter, Molly, 23; son, Ben, 19
Hobbies:
Road bicycling, mountain biking
Education:
Bachelor's degree in biochemistry, Dartmouth College, Hanover, Mass.; Washington University in St. Louis, School of Medicine; residency in emergency medicine, University of Massachusetts Medical Center, Worcester
Contact:
321-725-4505