St. Francis buys 4 Upstate urgent care centers

Bon Secours St. Francis Health System has signed a letter of intent to buy all four AFC Doctors Express Urgent Care centers in Greenville County, The Greenville News has learned.

The cost of the transaction was not disclosed.

The move is an effort to respond to consumers who want convenient care, said Mark Nantz, executive vice president of enterprise strategic initiatives for Bon Secours Health System Inc., St. Francis' parent company.

"We believe that patients are more and more wanting to receive care on their timetable," he said. "They want to walk in and get it when they want it. And they want it to be affordable."

Urgent care centers provide walk-in medical care on weekends and evenings, as well as during traditional doctors' hours. And they are popping up everywhere.

Nationwide, there are about 6,400 of these centers, with their growth doubling in 2011 alone, according to the Urgent Care Association of America. There are at least 109 in South Carolina.

Nantz said St. Francis has had plans to expand its urgent care footprint — it runs Bon Secours Express Care on East McBee Avenue in downtown Greenville — but wanted to determine whether it would be best to build more centers or buy them.

"About a year and a half ago, we started looking at the market and saw an awful lot of convenient care care out there, and we decided that adding another brand might not be the best way to go about it," he said. "So we began talking to players in the area to see if we could find a partnership with somebody already established."

They chose the AFC Doctors Express centers because of their locations — at Cherrydale, Woodruff Road, Greer and Simpsonville — as well as their accessibility and growth, he said.

Doctors Express centers operate as franchises, said Tim Groves, owner of three of the four locations who will stay on to manage them.

The original Doctors Express centers opened in 2005, he said, and were acquired in 2013 by American Family Care, which operates more than 140 clinics in several states.

Under the agreement, Groves said, St. Francis will own and operate the centers. AFC gets a franchise royalty but business decisions are made locally, he said.

Volume at the Woodruff Road location, which has been open since 2010, is up about 20 percent this year over 2014, he said. It's up about 50 percent at the other two, but they just opened in the last two years, so that's expected, he said.

The centers, which operate from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., log about 50,000 visits a year combined, said Dr. Anselmo Nunez, CEO of Bon Secours Medical Group.

The staff at the centers will become St. Francis employees, he said.

St. Francis currently employs about 124 primary care providers, 90 of whom are physicians, Nunez said. This will increase the number of full-time doctors by five, he said. Other physicians work at the centers as needed, he said, along with other advance practice providers, such as nurse practitioners.

In addition to the four centers, another two are planned for the Pelham Road and Augusta Road areas, Nantz said.

And another will open in a few months in the Professional Medical Center across the street from the ER at St. Francis-Downtown.

Greenville Health System has four MD 360 urgent care centers in the region and has plans for others in the Upstate.

Nantz said that the purchase of the urgent care centers is not part of a competitive medical arms race, but rather a part of the continuum of care that patients say they want.

The Affordable Care Act, with its focus on reduced health care costs, is another driver, he said, because it's less expensive to provide care in an urgent care center than a hospital.

Nantz added that the arrangement will enable St. Francis to connect patients who don't have a primary care doctor with any physician they may need.

Groves said the partnership will help the clinics, which accept all insurance including Medicare and Medicaid, to grow.

St. Francis doctors can refer their patients to the urgent cares after hours and on weekends, he said, and the centers can refer to St. Francis specialists on a fast track.

"We felt that we wanted to continue growing the business but needed a bigger partner to do that," he said, "and they have all the infrastructure in place."

In the coming months and years, Nantz said, St. Francis will invest more in providing services outside the hospital.

"Our model is developing to be, how do we deliver more and more high-level services in an outpatient setting," he said. "The future of our business is to deliver care in the lowest cost setting."

Nantz said St. Francis is in the process of rebranding the centers, and that in addition to AFC Doctors Express, they will sport the Bon Secours St. Francis name and fleur-de-lis insignia.

The deal is expected to close by Sept. 30, Nantz said.