It’s just amazing to watch what’s going on with healthcare in the southern suburbs outside of Houston. There have been 14 new clinics, day surgery centers and emergency care clinics opened since December 2013. Of course Houston has added 250,000 people in the last three years alone and a whole lot of them live outside the city. Many, many new doctors and all seem to be from somewhere outside the United States.
The size of the office staff has also increased significantly just to handle all the new electronic record demands.
The other thing I see happening is that many of the doctors who are specialists see patients at a different office location each day of the week. If I want to see mine locally I have to have an appt on Wednesday. If I need to see him on Monday, I have to go to League City, Tuesday he’s in Bellaire, etc. Five different specialists get together and rent five offices and each has one day per location. Staff, equipped with computers and medical samples, travels around the city with them.
Yeah I’m thinking the new clinics are due to population growth. We’ve seen new urgent care centers in the last couple of years, but not a lot of change since 2003.
The trend to specialists and even general doctors maintaining multiple offices isn’t brand new either. You see that more in smaller towns, and rural areas where a physician will maintain an office for a day because there is just not enough volume to maintain an office there full-time. It makes sense that they would team up and share the office.