There are roughly 15,000 urgent care centers in this country handling 200 million patient visits a year, and most of workers’ comp still treats them as the place you go when the ER is full. Dr. Paul Nanda, Chief Medical Officer of TGH Urgent Care powered by Fast Track, joins Mark and Bob to explain what the industry is missing. He makes the case that urgent care is not a waystation but a specialty in non-life-threatening acute care, capable of managing a claim from date of injury all the way to MMI, with x-rays, splinting, direct specialist referrals that bypass the emergency room entirely, and a client services team dedicated to the paperwork nobody else wants to touch. Along the way he tackles the uncomfortable questions: whether seeing a nurse practitioner means settling for lesser care, why primary care physicians slam the door the moment you check the “work related” box, what happens when the country is short 100,000 doctors and new physicians graduate owing $350,000, and how ambient AI scribes are quietly giving clinicians back two hours a day. Bob gets a colonoscopy bill out of his system, Mark asks the question everyone is thinking, and somewhere in the middle Dr. Nanda offers three answers to the provider shortage, at least one of which he warns will be unpopular.
