During the late 1990s, Dr. Kevin DiBenedetto and Dr. Graham Tujague, emergency room physicians at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, began to wonder what could be done to relieve overcrowding in the ER, and how patients who weren’t critically ill could be served more efficiently.
They realized there was a need for a clinic that specialized in those illnesses and injuries—broken bones, sprains, fevers, cuts needing stitches and so on—that may not be serious enough for the emergency room but are too serious to wait for that next trip to the family doctor. That led them to investigate “urgent care” medicine, which DiBenedetto says was a relatively new concept at the time.
“We really didn’t have any research to go on,” he says in a feature in the latest issue of Business Report. “The whole model, we kind of developed it as we went along.”
Their idea has led, more than 20 years later, to Premier Health, the fastest-growing company you’ve never heard of, with almost 40 clinics and about 650 employees.
Those early clinics opened as urgent care started growing rapidly during the mid-1990s, according to the Academy of Urgent Care Medicine. Demand was fueled by frustration over long waits in the emergency room—often for nonemergency care—and a shortage in available primary care appointments that often forced patients to wait weeks before seeing their family doctor.
When the co-founders launched Lake After Hours with OLOL in 1999 at Siegen Lane and Perkins Road, both sides were new to the urgent care clinic business. OLOL officials already knew and trusted DiBenedetto and Tujague, and the doctors benefited from the hospital’s name recognition and financial support.
That first successful Lake After Hours clinic grew into 16 clinics across the Baton Rouge region and in Covington, says Our Lady of the Lake CEO Scott Wester.
In early November, Premier opened its 38th clinic, part of its partnership with Indiana University Health, its biggest venture so far outside the state.
Premier was on pace to open No. 39 in St. Amant in December and another clinic with IU Health in January, and a project in Puerto Rico is in the works. The company hauled in about $55 million in revenue in 2014, says CEO Steve Sellars.
“These health systems recognize that this is a very important component,” he says. “A lot of them will describe the urgent care model as a front door to the health system.”
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