Bend Memorial Clinic unveiled its new Old Mill District location earlier this week, and with it comes reshuffled specialties among its clinics.

For starters, if you used to go to BMC’s Westside Clinic on Mount Bachelor Drive for urgent care, you’ll now be seen at the larger urgent care clinic in the new location at 815 SW Bond St. In addition to urgent care, the new, roughly 41,000-square-foot clinic will include family medicine, pediatrics, allergy and asthma, imaging and laboratory services, all of which will relocate from the provider’s existing east- and west-side clinics.

Christy McLeod, BMC’s chief operating officer, said although BMC has outgrown both of its Bend locations, more of the demand in recent years has been on the west-side clinic, prompting the decision to build the new, much larger clinic roughly 1 mile away.

“Last year, even during the snowiest periods, we had more and more people going to our west-side clinic,” she said, “and it became quickly apparent that they were interested in seeking care there, just by the sheer volume, the demand.”

The Old Mill location is roughly three times larger than the existing Westside Clinic, she said. The urgent care clinic alone is 13,000 square feet in the Old Mill clinic, compared with between 3,000 and 5,000 square feet at the Mount Bachelor Drive location, McLeod said. The Old Mill’s urgent care clinic will house its laboratory and imaging department, which will feature X-ray and ultrasound equipment.

More space for urgent care was crucial, as BMC has seen a 25 percent increase in urgent care visits since last year, McLeod said. Pediatrics has also seen a sharp uptick in demand, she said.

Much of the demand for urgent care came in the spring and was fueled by patients who had become insured since the Affordable Care Act’s insurance mandate kicked in at the beginning of the year, both on private plans and the Oregon Health Plan, the state’s version of Medicaid, said Dr. Terri Mucha, one of BMC’s urgent care physicians. During the summer, much of the demand was among out-of-towners who came to Bend for recreation, she said.

“Memorial Day weekend and in the summer, we got killed with tourists,” Mucha said.

Urgent care is different from emergency care in that it treats slightly less urgent cases, although Mucha said BMC’s urgent care clinics — particularly the one on the east side, where there is CT and MRI equipment — tend to take more serious cases than other urgent care clinics do, Mucha said. Urgent care tends to cost less than going to hospital emergency departments, because it’s billed as an outpatient visit. Emergency roooms, however, have to charge patients an extra facility fee to offset the hefty expense of keeping a clinic open 24/7.

“I think as we’re seeing people move to the high-deductible plans and everybody has to tighten up their costs, I think consumers are shopping around more,” Mucha said. “We’ve seen a huge increase in people coming to us because it’s a better value. They know it’s less wait, less of a bill. To some extent, we can sometimes even keep them from being admitted, so we save them a lot of money overall.”

BMC doesn’t plan to hire any new providers for its Old Mill clinic. Instead, they’ll come from BMC’s existing clinics. BMC added 13 new primary care and specialty providers in 2013, and several in 2014 as well, McLeod said. In August alone, the provider hired a pediatrician, gastroenterologist and an internal medicine physician, she said.

BMC has stopped accepting new primary care patients who rely on OHP, but still accepts those patients in its urgent care clinics as well as in some specialty services, McLeod said. BMC’s urgent care clinics saw the most growth among OHP patients, she said.

In addition to new patients, the provider also has found itself fielding a lot more questions than in previous years, McLeod said.

“People are very confused,” she said. “We saw not only the appointments jump, but the length of time people were on the phone talking, trying to answer questions.”

— Reporter: 541-383-0304,

tbannow@bendbulletin.com