If you’re in need of medical care but your doctor’s office is closed, you might think that your only option for comprehensive medical aid is at your local emergency room. Fortunately, this is not the case – and it’s a good thing too. After all, emergency rooms are often far from the place to be for any medical issue other than a genuine medical emergency. For one thing, the waiting times are long at emergency rooms seen throughout the country, and emergency room bills can be incredibly high. As a matter of fact, the average ER bill now costs more than $1000. If you go to an emergency room in your area, you are likely to find quite the opposite of convenient medical care.

Fortunately, there are many alternatives for convenient medical care growing all throughout the United States in its entirety. For one thing, your own general care practitioner is likely to have extended hours nowadays, with up to 40% of all GPs working in the evenings and during at least some of the weekend. As the average family doctor now spends more than 30 hours offering patient care over the course of the typical week (something that can be seen with nearly three quarters of all such doctors – around 70% of them to be just a bit more exact), you are more likely than ever to find convenient medical care with your own doctor.

Convenient medical care can also be found at your local 24 hour urgent care center. An urgent care center like this is able to provide on-demand care for all kinds of patients. After all, the typical urgent care center can provide nearly as much care as the ER could, able to treat up to 97% of all patients that they see and only needing to send around 3% to the local emergency room. This makes receiving convenient medical care easier than ever before, especially when you realize that such urgent care locations are popping up all throughout the country, with well over 7,000 of them active as of the year of 2016, more likely having opened in the time that has passed us by since. In future years, the prominence of urgent care locations providing convenient medical care will certainly only rise.

After all, going to an urgent care center for convenient medical care is just that: convenient. When you go to an urgent care center, for instance, you are likely to wait for only a short period of time. After all, more than half of all urgent care centers boast average wait times that are no greater than a mere 15 minutes. And it is not uncommon to see patients come in and then leave all within the span of just one single hour. At any given emergency room, this would be all but unheard of – if not just outright unheard of in the first place. At the end of the day, this can make a difference for seeking medical care.

Participating in telemedicine and speaking to an online doctor is also becoming more and more commonplace. Fortunately, there are many ways in which the virtual doctor can be implemented. In one scenario, patients are able to speak to their own doctors through such an online setting even after office hours. For many people, more than half of those who were surveyed, this is the only way that they would participate in telemedicine. For others, however, alternate methods of speaking to a virtual doctor still remain an option that they would be willing to try out.

For such people, options to speak to an online doctor still within the same practice as their usual doctor are also frequent and can be ideal as such doctors are more likely to have access to your medical records, which is something that the majority of people agree is important for telemedicine to work. Finally, you can speak to a doctor separate from the practice you attend, though this is certainly not the most popular option out there. For some situations, however, it is likely to suffice as a form of medical care.