Business Profile: Pulse Urgent Care, Mahopac

At Pulse Urgent Care, Faisel Ashraf takes pride in the fact that his center is just one step below an emergency room—and one cut above a regular doctor’s office.

Ashraf, the administrative director and COO of Pulse, said that there’s a shortage of urgent care centers in New York and in the Northeast as a whole. While places such as Texas, California, Florida and several mid-Atlantic states have plenty of urgent care facilities, that isn’t the case yet in the tri-state area.

But by opening up his second center, Pulse Urgent Care continues to capitalize in a field that’s in high demand. After opening the doors to his first center in Wappinger Falls two years ago Ashraf, along with this father and sister, opened up another center in Mahopac this past July. While the center is only starting with part time hours, by September the center should be welcoming patients in seven days a week.

“We looked around and we saw there’s not much out here,” Ashraf said. “Or anyone providing this sort of service so that’s what made us open up. We thought there was a great need in the community.”

And with that need, Ashraf is looking forward to helping as many patients as possible.

When it comes down to it, Ashraf said a patient shouldn’t be seen as number, which is far too often the case in the medical profession.

And that sort of passion comes from growing up and watching his father, who is also a doctor, Mirza Ashraf, go about his work. From an early age, Ashraf would go to the office and watch how his father treated patients.

“Just growing up, practicing medicine it was sort of ingrained in our brain that while practicing medicine, the patient always comes first and that’s the number one priority,” Ashraf said. “It’s not a business, it’s a service. It’s a very noble profession.”

Pulse Urgent Care is privately, independently and family owned, and takes all insurance companies and will even accept patients with no insurance at all.

Most of the patients that come in are young professionals, with young families and busy schedules. Rather than make an appointment, those patients like the convenience of being able to walk in and walk out, Ashraf said.

The center tries to stay open as many hours as it can, and has the uniqueness of being open on Sundays, when most doctor offices are closed. Ashraf even plans to have limited hours on holidays such as Christmas and Thanksgiving.

The cost at Pulse Urgent Care is also lower than if a patient were to go to the emergency room, Ashraf said. And because it’s an urgent care center, patients with the most serious ailments are served first. Overall, on Pulse’s website, doctors are equipped to handle more than 70 different medical challenges.

And the variety is certainly wide-ranging. Some of the problems patients walk in with can be rare as they are difficult to solve.

One couple came back from Jamaica and suffered from a rare parasite that the center treated. Another strange case was when a small child was bitten by a tick and caused paralysis that the center treated.

In some cases though, the doctors at Pulse Medical Care have no choice but to call for an emergency vehicle to pick the patient up if the condition is too serious.

Ashraf said the family wants to continue to open facilities, once a year, no matter how ambitious it might seem. While he wouldn’t say for sure where that next center would open, he is sure he wants to make the push to see urgent care centers become more common in New York.

“For us, branding is big,” Ashraf said. “We are trying to brand ourselves and try to create a name for ourselves and that’s important and definitely wherever there’s a need we’ll go.”