North Myrtle Beach urgent care clinic bringing back the ‘old doctor house call’
When imagining a visit from a doctor, an expensive ambulance ride is probably one of the first things to come to mind.
Michael and Michelle Petrillo are looking to change that.
The couple now run a mobile urgent care clinic in North Myrtle Beach, bringing back “the old doctor house call with a modern twist.” Their goal is to make health care more accessible to people by going straight to them, and by association making patients more comfortable and less afraid to seek necessary treatment, especially while the pandemic rages on.
“We’re finding that these virtual (visits) are are not working for a lot of folks,” Michelle Petrillo said. “You can’t touch the patient. You can’t listen to their heart and lungs. It’s just a virtual thing, and a lot of them are getting misdiagnosed because you can’t have that one on one with the patients. So we’re basically bringing back the old time doctor and the old time house call.
“The older folks are loving it because they remember when” house calls were common, and “the new folks are loving it because it’s something different,” she said.
The North Myrtle Beach Mobile Urgent Care, which primarily operates out of an ambulance, covers North Myrtle Beach, Little River, Longs and Atlantic Beach. Though, patients from surrounding areas can also drive to their office in North Myrtle Beach for treatment.
Benefits of in-home health care
Michael Petrillo, a certified physician’s assistant and doctor of medical science, said he decided to set up the clinic when looking at how limited brick and mortar urgent care clinics can be in both the procedures they can perform as well as their hours.
And with the COVID-19 pandemic going on, “no one wants to go sit in a waiting room” and risk catching the virus, he said.
“We’ve found that patients love this concept,” Michael Petrillo said. “We go to their house; they’re more relaxed. Instead of waiting in a crowded waiting room, they can wait in their house, and we can do just about everything an urgent care clinic can do.”
More than that, Michelle Petrillo said the real difference for them is how much time and care they can give to patients. A typical visit is close to 45 minutes, she said. The vast majority of office visits for doctors, 82%, are less than 30 minutes, and 42% are less than 15 minutes, according to a survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The goal is to make sure patients don’t feel rushed and feel comfortable asking as many questions as they need.
They also always follow up with the patient the day after their original visit.
“Patients are blown away that we take the time to text everyone that we’ve seen previously to make sure that they are doing OK,” said Michelle Petrillo, a registered medical assistant. “So, that follow through is really important to us and valuable to the patient.”
Services vary, but no insurance accepted
The mobile care offers services ranging from sports physicals to treating minor broken bones, cold and flu symptoms as well as suturing up cuts.
Based out of a beach town, they’ve even helped remove stingray barbs and can treat jellyfish stings. And they can draw blood and send samples off to be tested. Their van is also equipped with ultrasound equipment and a defibrillator.
But “we’re not an ambulance. We are an urgent care. We just drive to you,” Michelle Petrillo said. “And that’s what we want to make sure people understand — that we aren’t an ambulance.”
NMB Mobile Urgent Care doesn’t accept insurance, but the prices for all of their services are listed online, and the initial call-out price, $85, isn’t much higher than the average urgent care visit copay. Declining insurance made setting up the business easier, but Michael Petrillo said it hasn’t discouraged patients from calling them and some have been able to file receipts with their insurance to get reimbursed via out-of-network benefits.
“Most people don’t even balk at it,” Michael Petrillo said. “Ninety percent of our patients have insurance and they don’t care. They think it’s so safe and convenient. It’s so easy.”
‘Medical care has always been evolving’
Charles Bryan, a retired professor at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, said house calls like what the Petrillos do went away as modern medicine came to rely more and more on technology that didn’t exist outside of the physician’s office. However, he thinks the Petrillos may have found a potentially major new industry for health care, now that X-Ray machines and other important medical equipment is small enough to fit inside of an ambulance.
And with the growth in telemedicine in recent years, house calls like this could be the next step in making health care more accessible to people, Bryan said.
“Medical care has always been evolving,” Bryan said. “This is the latest thing, and may be another new advance in how health care is done.”
As an infectious disease doctor during the 1980s HIV epidemic, Bryan said he would make house calls to AIDS patients too sick to leave their homes or too far gone to warrant treatment at a hospital. For Bryan, the visits were less about offering actually medical care than offering emotional support to patients during what could be the worst time of their lives.
“My motto was to keep them out of the hospital. And I did it as an act of compassion,” Bryan said. “I would sometimes drive 30 miles out of the country to see somebody I knew I had never seen before just because I knew it was meaningful for them, for their doctor to care enough to go to see them.... One reason to do house calls — (and) some of the doctors still do — is for emotional support, to show that you really give a damn about the patient, to care to be there.”
‘We meet the neatest people’
The Petrillos’ range of services helps keep patients out of the emergency room for injuries and illnesses that are too much for some urgent care clinics to handle, but for which an emergency room visit may seem excessive.
Bryan said the couple’s initiative to follow up with patients on their own represents a huge shift in how much of modern medicine operates. While a hospital might follow up after something major like surgery, Bryan said it can be hard for patients to be able to check back in and ask questions after something minor, and automated phone systems that they have to battle through don’t help matters either.
GoMed clinic in Charleston offers similar services to that of NMB Mobile Urgent Care, but the Petrillos said they haven’t heard of any other clinics in the Grand Strand doing what they do. Bryan also said he hasn’t heard of this kind of care being common around the country, or even South Carolina, just yet.
Only open since June, the Petrillos say they are already looking to expand by adding on more medical staff and purchase another vehicle. The summer, where they saw lots of business from tourists and residents alike, showed them that there is a real interest and need for their services, Michael Petrillo said.
“I love it. It gets me out of the office,” Michelle Petrillo said. “We meet the neatest people. We have such a nice time, and the patients really love it.”
This story was originally published September 30, 2020 at 8:30 PM.
