There’s a New Doctor in Town: MY DR NOW Clinic offering family services with an emphasis on convenience and accessibility | News

It’s tough to get an appointment with a doctor.

We all know this. Even doctors and other healthcare professionals know it. It’s very frustrating on both sides of the examination table. It doesn’t help that we live in Arizona.

“Arizona overall has a big shortage of primary care providers,” Dr. Payam Zamani said. “Tucson is exacerbated a little bit more and patients really have to wait a long time to be able to obtain health care services.”

Zamani has a solution. His line of MY DR NOW clinics, a full family-medicine services office where patients may receive good health care at their own convenience. He’s opened a new MY DR NOW clinic in the Fry’s Shopping Center in Oro Valley. 

Services include primary care, pediatrics, women’s health, some behavioral health services, physicals, prescription refills, immunizations and some lab work. There are even house calls and video visits.

Zamani saw the need even as a young person. He was raised by a single mother — his father died when he was young. She worked two jobs and he saw how inconvenient business hours could be. Even when he was still training to be a doctor he was puzzled by the difficulty patients have getting to a doctor’s office.

“I couldn’t reconcile these two different conflicting ideas,” he said. “On one hand, we lecture patients regularly: ‘Your health care is important. Cancer screenings are important. Staying on top of your disease process is important. Prevention is important.’ Yet we expect you to take time off of work to obtain health care. We expect you to wait weeks or months for an appointment. Offices are not open the hours that make the most amount of sense. In fact they’re not even open during lunch time.”

How can patients be expected to look after these issues when they can’t get to an appointment?

Enter MY DR NOW.

Everything about the clinic, including the location, is chosen based on that need.

“We really like going into those grocery-anchored shopping centers because we believe that a key aspect of delivering better health care outcomes is decreasing the psychological barriers that people have in obtaining health care,” Zamani said. 

When medical offices are in medical office buildings sometimes people are hesitant to go because it’s unfamiliar and “it looks different, feels different, it even smells different.” Zamani believes these factors create anxiety in patients and they hesitate to see their provider. This Fry’s shopping center location mitigates that to some degree.

“We really try to place those clinics in areas that are easy to get to, where there’s a sense of familiarity, that psychologically there’s not a burden that you have to overcome just to get there and obtain health care,” he said. 

Equally important is the hours MY DR NOW is open.

“Our clinics are open with extended hours,” Zamani said. “We’re open on weekends, we’re open on holidays. We’re open early, we’re open late.”

Patients may even walk in without an appointment for any service people can get in any general practice office. 

Plus, MY DR NOW accepts new patients.

The office accepts all insurances and if a patient does not have insurance, the prices are listed on the website so there will be no surprises.

“We want the clinic to be available to everyone,” Zamani said.

Incidentally, he said their prices have not been raised since 2007.

This is Zamani’s 10th Tucson clinic and 74th clinic in the business.

“We are a family doctor’s office,” he said. “We really try to make it as easy as possible for people.”