The burdening cost of medical debt is enough to justify the debate between receiving treatment from an emergency room or from an urgent care. It’s critical for families that have a lot of urgent or emergency medical situations every year to understand this difference and decide on the right action to take. There may be many sides to that debate but there are also many agreed upon points to settle the matter and come up with a workable solution.

Any less informed person might hear the term ‘urgent’ care and innocently assume that this means a serious medical condition. Truthfully, if you have a non-urgent condition, urgent care centers are the best bet for time and cost. They are like a bridge between emergency room services and your primary care physician. Urgent care centers are usually open seven days a week, 9 p.m. or later. There’s no appointment necessary and they are usually staffed with family care and emergency room physicians. They mirror almost all services offered in an emergency room except two. They don’t keep medical history and they lack sophisticated medical equipment and advanced staff expertise. They therefore do not have sufficient capability to handle life threatening conditions. They have equipment like x-ray machines, and lab tests for carrying out things like blood-sugar tests and treating simple things like flu shots or casting broken bones. The average cost is about $150 per patient.

On the other hand, emergency rooms are set up to handle more life-threatening injuries. Even statistically, more patients in ERs arrive by ambulance. This says something about the capability of ERs to properly handle extreme medical situations. Emergency room patients receive one of 5 levels of care. The degree of seriousness of the problem increases with ascending order, with level one handling minor issues and level five receiving the most severe of cases. Any higher levels of care that may exist are for critically ill patients. The cost can easily run into thousands of dollars.

The decision on whether to go for ER or urgent care should be based on disease and cost rather than convenience. The difference between the two lies in the level of care, treatment and cost that each facility is able to provide. It’s important to fully understand the difference between the Emergency Room and Urgent Care to be able to make better decisions.