Residents seeking urgent medical care can now visit Buckhead’s newest clinic, Doctors Express, for a “one-stop shop.”

Open this week, the clinic, located at 1800 Howell Mill Road in the new Piedmont West Medical Building, is the first of a fledgling national franchise to open in Georgia.

With 2,400 square feet of space, six exam rooms and three physicians, Doctors Express will offer X-rays, lab results in minutes and an in-house pharmacy to dispense subscriptions.

The center will be open seven days a week from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. weekdays and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekends and will employ a staff of 10.

All this and the owners said wait time will be less than 20 minutes.

“It’s a new concept,” said owner Chris Rutledge, who plans to develop five to 10 more locations in Atlanta. “They’ve been operating in Maryland for about four years … We were actually one of the first franchisees to come on board.”

Starting in Baltimore and growing to 25 locations across Maryland, the new brand is starting to gain national attention. The founders’ goal is to have 3,000 locations nationwide.

Rutledge said he and his wife Theone, both with master’s degrees in business administration, saw a need for a quality urgent care center while they were seeking a new business venture.

“We’ve personally needed this kind of service with our children. We’ve done our duty in emergency rooms and that sort of thing,” the Buckhead resident said. “We felt like this kind of business would very much be a value and service to the community and one we’d really be proud to be a part of.”

With no professional background in medicine, the Rutledges hired Dr. John Destito, an urgent care veteran with more than 14 years of experience in pediatrics and internal medicine, as medical director.

“We feel that between the three of us we’ve got a really great set of skills and complement each other well,” said Rutledge.

So far, Doctors Express franchise owners have typically come from the corporate world, said franchise developer Doug Schadle.

“People like the Rutledges with good management and business skills can efficiently run a medical center because they’re used to delivering quality, timely service with customer satisfaction the number one goal,” he said in a statement. “The medical industry needs this.”

Rutledge said he is hoping the clinic will grow to serve more than 30 patients a day within the next 12 months.

“And we’d love to do more,” he said.