MONTEREY — Montage Health on Friday opened a new urgent care clinic in Monterey and will open another in Marina on Monday, which could take the load off its emergency room for minor injuries and ailments but will not be treating COVID-19.

A third MoGo clinic is planned for Carmel.

Monica Sciuto, the assistant communications director for the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula and Montage Health, said patients will be screened before being seen at the new urgent care facilities

“We will let patients know their options, just as all urgent care centers and physician offices are doing right now,” Sciuto said. “We do not recommend at this time that community members with minor respiratory illness visit the urgent care setting, as there is no treatment or cure for COVID-19.”

Instead, people with minor symptoms are being advised to stay home, isolate or visit evisit.montagehealth.org to have online contact with a health care provider. People can also call their doctor’s office or if the symptoms are severe they can call 911 or visit their local hospital.

As of Friday, there have been 27 confirmed cases of coronavirus infections in Monterey, but that number is only those individuals that the Monterey County Health Department has tested. The actual number is likely to be much higher. For example, unless stringent protocols are met, including travel requirements, first responders such as police and fire personnel are not being tested, according to Monterey and Seaside officials.

Outside the COVID-19 crisis, urgent care clinics can treat everything from ankle sprains to minor burns without having to be seen in an emergency room. Annually some 20,000 people are seen at CHOMP’s emergency room that could be treated less expensively and more efficiently at an urgent care center.

“The CHOMP emergency department, despite its significant expansion in 2006, continues to be impacted by overcrowding and long waits due to the high number of people who come to us who could have been seen in an urgent care facility or doctor’s office,” Sciuto said.

MoGo providers expect each of the three new centers to see 50 to 60 walk-in patients every day of the year from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. The Monterey MoGo clinic is located at 2020 Del Monte Ave., and Marina’s new clinic is in the Montage Wellness Center, 2920 2nd Ave.

“Our community needs more options for care,” says Cynthia Peck, a vice president of Montage Health and president of MoGo, a new urgent care initiative from Montage.

Montage conducted focus groups of local residents in Monterey, Marina and Carmel to garner perspectives on urgent care and their health care needs. The participants reported their experience as patients in local urgent care centers as often being less than optimal, Sciuto said.

The inability of participants to get immediate X-rays was their most common complaint. The second most common complaint was the experience of having to wait in small waiting rooms alongside patients with contagious conditions.

“We’ve re-engineered the entire service from the ground up,” Peck said.

A 2018 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that urgent care visits more than doubled among insured Americans between 2008 and 2015.

Patients will be greeted at the door by one of two people they will interact with during the entire visit, Peck said. A “clinical concierge staff member” will set the visit up for the provider, who will see the patient. The same staff member from the start of the visit will then wrap it up. Patients only need to explain their symptoms once, simplifying the communication process.

“It will be a much more personal and high-touch experience,” Peck said.

The region has been experiencing a critical shortage of primary care physicians locally for at least 20 years. While Montage said it is recruiting and hiring physicians from out of the area for the last 10 years, it has not yet solved the problem.

As a result, many local primary care physicians can’t accept new patients. For those who do, the wait to be seen is often a couple of months. Even for existing patients, waits to be seen are often several weeks to months.

“We are excited to try this new approach to solving that much more global problem,” she says. “Our community deserves a solution.”