Berkshire Health Systems says the company’s third urgent care center in the county is located inside the Williamstown Medical facility at 197 Adams Road.
“Urgent care has been a trend that patients have been seeking for a number of years now across the region and throughout the county," said BHS Spokesperson Michael Leary. "As you probably know, we opened urgent care centers in Pittsfield about 10 years ago, and a new urgent care center in Lenox came about earlier this year after a couple of years of planning, and both have been very well received by the community.”
Leary says urgent care facilities, where patients are treated first by either a nurse practitioner or a physician assistant, offer a helpful alternative to emergency rooms.
"For minor illness and injury, and urgent care center is the best solution, both for clinical as well as financial reasons, because the copay is significantly lower than if you go to an emergency room,” he said.
In addition to the three urgent care centers, BHS also owns and operates the county’s major hospitals: Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, Fairview Hospital in Great Barrington, and North Adams Regional Hospital.
“North Berkshire had an urgent care facility for some time," said Leary. "Unfortunately, that urgent care facility closed fairly recently. Berkshire Health System saw a need in the community to restore urgent care services, and decided to act fairly quickly on this. We were fortunate that the Williamstown Medical building had space available for us to use as an as a smaller version of urgent care. It is smaller compared to Pittsfield and Lenox, but it does offer all the same services and the same level of quality of care.”
BHS says the facility served almost 70 patients on its first day of operation earlier this month.
Local leaders like State Representative John Barrett of the 1st Berkshire District are hailing the center’s opening.
“I think it's important for a lot of reasons, but I think the most important is because of the age of our population up here," he said. "We have so many seniors up here, we have a lot of people also that are on Medicare, Medicaid, and they need those services. So, it's a very important element to a quality of life in the region, obviously.”
According to a Georgetown University study in 2023, almost a quarter of Berkshire County’s disproportionately older population rely on Medicaid coverage- about a percentage point over the commonwealth average.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act President Donald Trump signed into law in July makes a 15% cut to Medicaid spending, according to health policy nonprofit KFF.
Barrett was also once the long-tenured mayor of North Adams. He says the Northern Berkshires are only just coming out of a decade-long health care drought during which the region’s sole hospital in the city was shuttered. It reopened its doors in 2024 under BHS ownership.
“Obviously, when the hospital closed in 2014, there was also a loss of many physicians in the area that had moved on and moved to other places, and it really hurt healthcare in the region," said the state rep. "Thanks to the efforts of so many people — Berkshire Health Systems [being] willing to step in and fill that void, our political leaders that got things moving and were able to get the regional hospital reopened.”
The Democrat says the urgent care center’s opening comes at a critical time for his constituents. As the Trump administration carries out cuts to federal programming, the onus is on state leaders to fill voids in crucial lifelines, especially in Northern Berkshire County, which is on average poorer per capita than the rest of Massachusetts and even other parts of the region.
“Everybody's concerned about the cost of health care in the future and over the next several months, and of course, next year in particular, we don't know what to expect," said Barrett. "We don't know what's going to come from support in Washington, where they don't seem to care about health at all. But we've been able to build upon it with a good coalition of people, but it is very important. It's on everybody's mind, not only the cost of health care, but also the services that come with it.”
