They’re not quite urgent care centers and they’re not quite hospitals. They’re “micro-hospitals,” and they are starting to sprout up in different parts of the country.

Micro-hospitals are small: generally 15,000 to 30,000 square feet. They typically have emergency rooms, examination rooms, operating rooms, and inpatient rooms for observation care and short stays. They offer lab and radiology services and are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They cost more than urgent centers and less than hospitals and some insurers are still trying to figure out how to pay them.

The state of Colorado licenses micro-hospitals as “community hospitals,” a term that usually has an entirely different connotation, and they are thought to be better suited for large urban and suburban metro areas. Often, they are introduced in areas where the demand for care is not sufficient to merit the development of a full-scale hospital but where they can feed patients to their health system owners.

Learn more about micro-hospitals in this Fierce Healthcare article and this report in the Denver Post.

Boookmark