By Jodi Schwan

If patients visiting the new Sioux Falls Specialty Hospital Urgent Care feel a little like they’re in an Apple store, then the design will have hit its mark.

“We’ve always thought of ourselves at the forefront of innovation and putting patients at the center of what we do, so we wanted to design a building that was similar,” said Jon Crow, director of operations.

“Apple has a long track record of designing products and retail that’s very attractive and appealing, so we incorporated some design cues into our building.”

The new 25,000-square-foot building at 85th Street and Minnesota Avenue was designed to be modern, sleek and technologically advanced, with the “ability to feel like a place you’ll receive top-notch care because attention was paid to detail,” Crow continued.

The new building is split between occupational medicine and urgent care. While Sioux Falls Specialty has offered acute care services and same-day appointments through its primary care, the new clinic is the first to focus on what CEO Dr. Blake Curd called “acute, episodic health care needs.”

That can be anything from an earache to a twisted ankle or a cut that might need stitches.

“We streamlined the process much like our hospital,” Curd said. “There’s not a lot of time for the patient to sit around and wait. It’s all entailed to make the patient experience that much better.”

The location at 85th and Minnesota is strategically set in a “burgeoning area of Sioux Falls in Lincoln County between Harrisburg and Sioux Falls, where there’s so much growth — residential with multifamily developing, retail, and the new Highway 100, which will provide great access when it’s done. Some people in the south are growing tired of the north-south thoroughfares to get services, and if there’s something closer to home, I think they will access it.”

Sioux Falls Specialty has identified other locations that could be a fit for additional urgent care centers, Curd said.

“I think it’s very realistic that you’ll see us replicate this somewhere else,” he said. “We think it will be well-received, but we want to do a proof-of-concept and make sure we understand the business and that we’re meeting patient needs. Then we want to reproduce it where it makes sense. We don’t want to duplicate services. There’s already a lot of health care in Sioux Falls, and the last thing the city needs is a bunch of health care that’s underutilized.”

A ribbon-cutting is scheduled at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 30, and patients will be seen starting Dec. 4.

Hours are 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. weekdays and 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.