New urgent care opens in Pahrump

A new urgent care facility with a rotation of medical experts, sophisticated equipment and 16 partitioned exam rooms has opened at 1460 E. Calvada Blvd.

Pahrump Urgent Care is now treating adult walk-in patients with sprains and strains, eye irritations, urinary tract infections, skin rash and allergic reactions, injuries from accidents and falls, ear aches, respiratory illnesses, sore throat and more.

Dr. Tali Arik and his colleague, Dr. Julie Woodward, expanded Pahrump Cardiology and Family Practice within the same building at 1470 E. Calvada on Feb. 28 to offer this layer of patient care to the entire community, including the patients in their practice.

“We’re definitely multi-specialty, and we try to really take care of the entire patient. That’s what sets us apart from anybody else in Nye County,” said Dr. Woodward.

Dr. Arik’s is an independent practice, complete with Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support (ACLS) certified providers, crash carts, defibrillators, X-ray, and high tech imaging modalities. They specialize in family practice, cardiology, pain management, and women’s health.

“With the way it’s integrated here with our practitioners, it’s different—it’s not just an urgent care. There are practicing people. We have two cardiologists, we have all this diagnostic equipment. So we can figure out, as opposed to just saying, ‘Gee, you’re short of breath.’ We can say ‘You’re short of breath and it’s due to a pericardial effusion, or you have heart failure, or you have pneumonia.’ And we can give a specific treatment for that person. That’s the difference. We also have a lab to diagnose the most common abnormalities. Blood, urine, special cardiac tests. We’re an urgent care; you want the diagnosis right away. We get you results right away,” says Dr. Arik.

“We run back and forth from primary care to urgent care all day long,” Dr. Woodward said.

Within the urgent care suite, they utilize ultrasound for conditions such as pelvic pain, or abdominal pain. A mobile X-ray is used for imaging limb injury.

“In the procedure room, we perform incision, drainage, for seroma or abscess; we suture lacerations or staple, whatever the situation warrants. We provide IV hydration, antibiotic therapy; we have a plethora of medications on site to be able to treat the patient intravenously,” Dr. Woodward said.

“We actually treat the conditions here, and keep them from having to go to a hospital,” said Dr. Arik. “We’ve had some pretty significant conditions here already that we’ve been able to treat here in town, whereas normally they’d have to go to Vegas and be admitted for two or three days.”

A patient who has a remote monitoring system for congestive heart failure through an implanted chip was developing fluid overload, he said. The remote monitoring station alerted the patient.

“So we told her to come to Urgent Care,” Dr. Arik said. “Sure enough, she had been more short of breath than usual, so instead of admitting her to the hospital, we gave her a dose of diuretics here, so she was able to go home. And not be admitted.”

There’s no need to treat mild cases of heart failure in a hospital setting, Dr. Arik said.

“We had a person come in with various kinds of chest pains. We did an echocardiogram; the patient had a rapid heart rate,” he said. “Turns out the patient had an inflammation around the heart called pericarditis. That doesn’t need to be admitted. She was able to go home, with the right diagnosis and treatment. She will come back for follow-up.”

But treatment options at Urgent Care come with limitations.

“Heart attack, stroke, stabbing, gunshot wound, serious trauma – those will all warrant a 911 call,” Dr. Arik said. “The professional connections we have in Las Vegas to do tele cardiology consults have resulted in accelerated scheduling and treatment. Instead of waiting two weeks to be seen in Vegas, we can get patients in within hours,” said Dr. Arik

Urgent Care is open 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

Family Practice hours are Monday to Thursday, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Their phone number is 775-210-8333.

There are 13 medical providers, six of whom rotate through Urgent Care. Two are full-time cardiologists. The balance are imaging specialists, physicians or nurse practitioners.

“Pahrump is a much larger community now—45,000 people, a lot of whom are very sophisticated. People expect things to be done to a certain level or standard,” says Dr. Arik. A major part of his vision is “to transform the health care experience by offering essential services both coordinated and convenient within the local community, making quality care accessible to patients and families.”

Dr. Arik became genuinely enthusiastic when showing off his business card, which features his theme, “Living here, working here, caring for you here in Pahrump.”

Dr. Arik has practiced in Pahrump since 2005, and he moved here in 2014.

“We have a unique cardiology set-up to do cardiology diagnostics. There’s several ways to figure out problems: EKG and monitoring, ultrasound for looking at structures, echocardiogram. Our equipment is the latest best versions of that, so our imaging is really great. We can use imaging to view any artery in the body.”

For cardiology, it’s a complete package, he said.

“Our images are cloud based, so anyone can access them with the appropriate user name and password, so if I have someone’s echo and want to share that with a specialist, let’s say the patient might need cardiac surgery, I can send that imaging to the surgeon to get a second opinion,” Dr. Arik said. “That’s another way a patient doesn’t need to go to Las Vegas necessarily to get an opinion about that. All with the patient’s permission, of course.”

The center also performs PET scans, stress testing where doctors examine heart arteries.

“Coronary arteries are too small to view with CT. PET is done with nuclear medicine. There are only 250 PET cardiac nuclear scanners across the U.S. to look at coronary arteries and blood flow; we have one of them here. We have the technicians to operate it, and the specialists to interpret it,” Dr. Arik said. “We can rule out heart disease with a high degree of accuracy in some cases, more accurate than doing an invasive angiogram. We can decide who needs a procedure, or who simply needs an adjustment in medication.”

Most angiograms are not necessary, he said. Most stents also are not necessary.

“You have technology like this, you can keep people from having unnecessary risky procedures. And there’s the inconvenience of going to Las Vegas, and recovering. Diabetics, hypertensives, people with active chest pain with a normal PET scan, it means things are OK,” Dr. Arik said. “On the other hand, people with pre-existing heart disease can have a PET scan performed here to determine level of severity of presenting symptoms.”

If a patient has chronic shoulder pain, the practice can also get to the root cause.

“We actually do interventional procedures. We take a multi-modal approach,” Dr. Woodward said. “We use image guided technology to perform joint injections with ultrasound: hips, knees, shoulders, carpal tunnel, plantar fasciitus, those types of things.”

Many specialists are available for consultations at the Pahrump office.

“When those consultants come out here, they see 20 Pahrump patients each time. Those are all patients who would otherwise have to go to Las Vegas, or would simply not get care,” Dr. Arik said.

Pahrump Cardiology &Family Practice and Urgent Care accepts many insurance programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, Anthem CBS, Aetna POS/Medicare Advantage, Humana, Loomis – Sierra Healthcare Options, MGM, Optum, P3 Health, and City of Las Vegas.

For information call, 775-210-or visit www.pahrumpcardiology.com.