Doctors Express hopes to franchise urgent care in U.S.

— -- At his Doctors Express center in Towson, Md., Dr. Scott Burger has spent the last three years tending to the community's night-time fevers and weekend hurts.

Now, the former emergency room physician wants to take the center's model nationwide, doing for urgent health care what, say, Papa John's did for pizza — making sure the public can find it anywhere and always knows what it's going to get.

"In every community, at least one," Burger, 36, says of his ultimate goal, "so when people think of where they need to go for their health care needs, the first thing they think. .. is 'Where's the Doctors Express?'

At a time President Obama is pressing Congress to radically overhaul the nation's health care system with an eye to affordable insurance for everyone, Burger and his partners are trying to launch the nation's first urgent-care franchise, applying a model often associated with fast food and car repair to centers that would deliver affordable, non-emergency treatment to almost anyone who walks in.

They're hoping to open 3,000 centers around the country, at which members of the public can come in without an appointment, in the evening or on weekends when their own doctors' offices are closed, and get stitches, something for a sore throat or even a broken bone treated for a fraction of what they'd pay for a trip to an emergency room, and without the wait.

They say they'll differ from the roughly 8,000 other urgent-care centers, as well as smaller retail clinics that have sprung up in shopping centers in the last decade, by offering a consistent, broad range of treatment and service on the spot. Every Doctors Express will have a physician on duty at all times, unlike some centers that leave patient care to the supervision of a nurse practitioner or other professional. All will have digital X-ray equipment, a lab and a pharmacy to dispense drugs, which other urgent-care centers may not have.

And unlike most other centers, many Doctors Express franchises can be owned by corporate managers who don't have a medical background. The company says it will guide them in everything from what credentials to look for when hiring staff to how to pick the best location.

"It is novel since it's the first one," says Lou Ellen Horwitz, executive director of the Urgent Care Association of America. "We've seen a variety of different ways of setting up (urgent-care centers) and managing them on both a regional and a national level, just not this particular franchise model."

Burger is close to seeing whether his center, which has been open three years, can be replicated elsewhere and if his idea takes off.

The first franchise is scheduled to open July 30, in Temple, Texas. The private company says it has sold roughly two dozen more in Texas, Georgia, New Jersey, South Carolina, North Carolina, Colorado and Virginia, but there's no schedule yet for them to open, and they cannot be independently confirmed.