Medicine’s Same Day Clinic started as an urgent care service for the acute care needs of internal medicine patients at the ACC. When a patient’s established provider was booked they could instead be seen in Same Day Clinic. Now at Eastowne, the clinic is expanding to meet the needs of patients across the Department of Medicine, with acute needs while at home, in other Eastowne clinics, and even the Emergency Department.
“We are excited to expand the Internal Medicine Same Day Clinic to all Department of Medicine patients. This is an urgent care-type clinic staffed by general internists, previously only available to patients seeing our General Medicine providers,” said Stacie Nichols, the clinic’s nurse manager. “It’s actually better than urgent care.”
Convenient For Patients
When a patient has an immediate care need, Department of Medicine clinicians can refer the patient to Same Day for acute needs related or unrelated to the primary issue they manage. Nichols says there are many patients who will benefit from the expansion.
“The Geriatric Specialty Clinic, for example, doesn’t usually have availability for acute care appointments because appointments are booked well into the future. However, a geriatric patient could be seen in Same Day, and the patient’s doctor can Epic chat with an internist.”
The expansion will also be easier and more convenient for patients. Urgent care clinics are usually busy and during winter months, they often see many patients who have respiratory illnesses. Expanding the Same Day Clinic will protect patients and minimize situations where they may have to visit the ED.
Medical Director Christine Gladman, MD, MPH, says the move to Eastowne with other Department of Medicine Clinics has fostered closer collaborations with colleagues and enabled the expansion.
“Same Day can see patients who are already at Eastowne, who need services that cannot be easily provided within the specialist’s own clinic.”
This might include a patient who comes in for allergy shots but has a wound that needs to be lanced. It might be a patient in infectious diseases with recurrent infections and high blood sugar, a rheumatology patient with unilateral leg swelling, or a patient in the Diuresis Clinic who reports symptoms that are concerning for urinary tract infection. This also includes patients who are at home who otherwise could not be seen quickly enough, who should be clinically stable enough to be seen in any urgent care.
A Same Day appointment may also provide patients with more consistent care at a lower cost because Same Day is billed like a regular provider appointment.
And, the clinic is a great option for patients admitted from the Emergency Department, who can be safely discharged with a Same Day follow-up the next business day.
Instructions for Referrals
Medicine’s Same Day Clinic is located on the fifth floor of the Eastowne Medical Office Building, staffed by internal medicine residents, supervised by faculty providers. The hours of operation are Monday through Friday, 8:30 am – 5 pm, with the last patient appointments scheduled at 4 pm.
For patients who need a primary care provider for continuity of care, the clinic requests that a new patient referral go to UNC Internal Medicine Eastowne rather than referring to the Same Day Clinic. A listing of current providers who are accepting new patients can be found on the Division of General Medicine website.
Additionally, the clinic now offers COVID vaccinations and has the capacity to serve patients on the same day of their Eastowne appointments.
Click here for Same Day Clinic referral/scheduling instructions.