Eili Wright / Daily Summit News
Dr. Nizar Assi, a local doctor, remembers a time when his son injured himself while skiing.
“My son, who loves to ski in the trees, regularly ran in the trees,” laughed Assi. Then her son would come home and complain of discomfort. Due to Assi’s medical history, he would examine his son and rarely find a problem.
However, Assi said on one particular occasion, his son continually complained of a bad headache. Assi knew his son needed a CT scan, so he immediately filed a request at one of the local Summit County hospitals. The hospital responded by insisting that her son be sent to the emergency room. Assi knew it wasn’t necessary because his son didn’t need immediate attention. Nevertheless, Assi complied.
“My son had to go and sit in the car for six hours to get the…scan,” Assi said. In the end, nothing was wrong with his son, but the time he spent waiting was – in Assi’s opinion – unnecessary.
“It would be a perfect situation for emergency care,” Assi said.
After years of thinking about a solution to Summit County’s limited medical resources and ER visits for illnesses that weren’t emergencies, Assi is opening an emergency department of his own design in Dillon.
Assi was born in Lebanon and started working in the United States in his twenties. He was an emergency physician and is now a cardiologist. Since 2002, he has lived in Breckenridge with his family.
During his early years at Summit, Assi recalled that there were very few medical options to turn to, especially if their situation was not an emergency.
“I call it a need for something in between,” Assi said. “The kids will be sick, but they’re not that bad, they don’t really need to go to the emergency room and be there for hours. So I kind of started thinking about urgent care before there was urgent care.
Soon Assi decided to build an urgent care center in Summit County as a retirement project. His goal was to create an efficient system that also delivered high quality care. Assi acknowledged that Summit County can be a very transient community with many people who lack reliable insurance, if any.
For the past five years, Assi has worked to get emergency care started. It was supposed to open in July, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic and supply chain issues, the opening date was pushed back.
In the meantime, the emergency care setup has been thoroughly scrutinized and scrutinized by Assi.
Walk-in care will be available for minor trauma, altitude sickness, or little things like cuts and lacerations. There will also be x-ray, CT scanner, laboratory services and diagnostic screening equipment. In addition to intermediate care, there will also be primary care resources. Assi plans to include a service for those who need a check-up as well as options for those who need to be seen more regularly.
Assi also added three adjoining studios to the building for his employees to stay in while they search for community housing.
As for the dilemma of waiting, Assi aims to “make things smoother for everyone”.
“We’re basically going to provide two types of access. … You can go online, and you can choose a certain time you want to come in, or you can watch the wait time,” Assi said. “We don’t want people to sit down.”
Assi funded much of this project with his own savings. After working with a consulting firm that helped him determine the best location, Assi chose Dillon for emergency care at a time when he said “prices were pretty dormant”. For the construction, he also took out a loan. The rest, however, came out of his own pocket.
“It’s a project that I basically saved up for,” Assi said. “I planned it.”
He added that emergency care was not his first health care project, so he had specific goals online to make emergency care possible.
“My focus isn’t really financial gain, because there are a lot of things you could do to get a better return,” Assi said. “The best you can hope for is to create what I call a sustainable business – that you can keep a stable workforce, meet their needs and, at the same time, provide the service in the community and create a cushion of reserves so that you can continue to reinvest in the sustainability of the business.
After almost 20 years of planning for this urgent care, Assi is close to completion. He predicted the location would open in December, but a solid date is still up in the air.
“We don’t want to replace your health care provider. And we don’t want to replace emergency rooms to care for these very, very sick people,” Assi said. “But we want to be the link between the two.”
Assi predicted that the emergency room will be open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. or 7 p.m. seven days a week.