Physician Assistant
Laura
Laura
Wisniewski, PA-C
PRIMARY CARE/EMERGENCY MEDICINE/NEW YORK CITY
Clinically conservative with testing and treatment alike, whether the case is acute or chronic, a new patient or one she's followed for years: order and treat what changes the plan, not what's reflexive, or what the patient is necessarily asking for.
One clinician follows the problem through: from the visit, to the result, to the resolution.
No finding disappears into a chart. Every result gets read, and every read gets a next step.
Care built on relationships and history, not fragmented care or a rotating door of one-off visits, though not every visit calls for a follow-up. When it's clinically appropriate, she builds in a second touchpoint even for acute visits, starting treatment, then following up in person or by telehealth, rather than assuming it worked. That habit sharpens pattern recognition as much as it builds trust.
For PA new grads working in urgent care, and experienced PAs transitioning into it, not students or pre-PA. Urgent care is its own specialty: a balancing act between acuity and volume, time management, and structure and autonomy, without the deep bench of a hospital floor behind you, and without diagnostic testing that's always readily available either.
Strong clinical leadership isn't optional in that setting, it's essential, and that doesn't stop mattering once you're experienced. Every PA can benefit from having a boss who is specifically clinical, another PA, an NP, an MD, or a DO, no matter how competent or independent they are. Being good at the job and valuing that structure aren't mutually exclusive. She's ultimately accountable for her own actions and medical decision-making regardless, having a clinical boss doesn't change that.
Not having one isn't necessarily a problem in the short term, plenty of competent, experienced PAs manage well without it, but that it hasn't been a problem yet doesn't mean it never will be. Without real clinical oversight built into the structure, that gap tends to show up later, not as a lack of day-to-day competence. That doesn't mean hand-holding, micromanaging, or someone checking every chart. It means having a clinical person available when a case is genuinely challenging or resources are limited, someone you can ask, not just a name on a file. For example, presenting the case, sharing your differential and what you think the diagnosis actually is, and asking whether they agree. Oversight itself matters less the longer you're in it, new grads and experienced PAs alike need less checking than people assume.
What matters most, and doesn't stop mattering, is having someone in that role who will advocate for you when you need it, for example, defending you against an unfair patient review, not someone who's only there to satisfy a specific requirement and check a box. What you want is someone who wants to be in that role and shows that consistently through their actions. You also want someone who recognizes their own limits and mistakes, and who sees themselves as a lifelong learner too.
This isn't built for every urgent care model. Seeing more than 50 patients a day consistently, the kind of volume at many corporate or PE-owned urgent care facilities, for example, is a genuinely different job. A pace that leaves room to listen, think through a differential, and not rush through visits, that's what patient care requires, and if that sounds unimpressive to you, this isn't the right fit either. At the end of the day, patient care is what matters most.
Being a new grad isn't a weakness; it's actually a strength. It's an opportunity to develop good habits early, with self-awareness about what you know, what you don't, and when to ask for help, and a clear sense of your own niche rather than desperation to take whatever comes along. Having worked in urgent care from both the clinical support side and the provider side, across multiple locations in New York City, Laura has a distinct perspective on what makes urgent care work, and what doesn't.
Working through real cases the way you'll actually see them, not the textbook or UpToDate version.
Finding the balance in a setting that demands all three, and learning to read a new acute visit fast.
What to ask in an interview, how to read a job before you sign, and what to look for and negotiate in a contract. Know your worth.
Navigating autonomy, uncertainty, and when to escalate in a real urgent care environment, not the version taught in school.
If you're evaluating an urgent care role, start with the concrete list: salary, type of employment, the specialty itself, adult, pediatric, or both, and if both, at what age the cutoff is. The practice's location. If there's more than one site, which ones specifically, how often you'd be expected at each, and which one would be your primary site. Whether malpractice coverage is provided, and if so, whether it's claims-made or occurrence-based. If it's claims-made, make sure you have tail coverage before you leave. And what the long-term plan looks like, not just this year. Then get into responsibilities: what would you actually be doing, and does it match what the role claims to be? The strongest job descriptions are specific and internally consistent with the specialty being advertised, and they read like they were written by a clinician: real duties that put you at the top of your license, clear enough that you're not left wondering whether you'll end up doing something substantially different from what you applied for. Some physician-owned practices write these well, though not all. "Comprehensive urgent care" on its own doesn't tell you which of those you're getting. Defining that scope takes a specific type of clinical person: an NP, PA, MD, or DO. If reading a job description leaves you confused about what's actually expected, that's worth trusting, other candidates are noticing the same thing. If it's not already spelled out clearly, that's one of the first questions worth asking, and a practice that can't answer it, doesn't know it, or only thinks they know it, is worth noting before you continue to express interest. A useful answer tells you what you'll be doing: the patients you'll see, the clinical responsibilities you'll have, what you will, and won't, be expected to do, and what might be missing entirely. "It's a fast-paced urgent care" or "you'll see a mix of patients" doesn't answer that question. Whatever the answer is, it belongs in your contract, not just a conversation.
Ask whether a practice offers a productivity incentive, and if so, exactly how it is earned and what the calculation actually looks like. Get the details: what counts toward it, how it's measured, when it applies, and what you have to do to qualify. If it's part of your compensation, it should be spelled out in the contract, not left as something you were told during an interview. It's also worth asking what a productivity incentive is actually designed to reward. A bonus tied primarily to volume and speed creates a different practice environment from one tied to follow-up, patient retention, quality, or outcomes. The incentive itself isn't necessarily the problem; the metric behind it is. Look at what a practice says it values, then look at what its compensation structure actually rewards, and pay close attention to whether those two things are consistent. That consistency, or inconsistency, is the real pattern worth watching for, and it's another kind of pattern recognition that's valuable for PAs to develop early.
Laura is a Physician Assistant with experience across adult primary and urgent care in New York City, most recently at MiDoctor Health, managing a broad caseload that spans common acute complaints such as URIs, UTIs, severe gastroenteritis, and nonobstructing kidney stones, chronic disease management across cardiology, endocrinology, psychiatry, and urology, and ongoing preventative care such as PrEP counseling and LGBTQ+ health. Patient education was a constant thread through it, infection prevention and isolation precautions, being honest about what she was seeing and why, and making sure a patient left knowing their own plan. She initiated referrals to specialty services when a case called for it, interpreted labs and imaging, and joined interdisciplinary team meetings. Beyond her own patients, she was also frequently relied upon for clinical judgment across the practice: prescription refills, patient clinical questions, escalation of care for support staff, and clinical questions that came up at another site while she was working in Hell's Kitchen. In addition to the constant clinical decision-making of often working as a sole provider, she'd also step into many of the medical director's responsibilities on days the medical director was covering ED shifts elsewhere: identifying a liability issue when a patient claimed authorization to receive injectable supplies for self-administration, and de-escalating a conflict between a patient and a support staff member over a misunderstanding about patient privacy, clarifying staff roles along the way and holding the patient accountable for how he'd treated her team.
Before that, she was a hospitalist PA at Mount Sinai West, managing patients with sepsis, stroke, and diabetes among other acute conditions, work grounded in a strong internal medicine foundation and a belief that keeping patients out of the ER, when it's safe to, of course, is part of the job. Her interest in emergency medicine started early, as an EMT in college, then again during a Level II trauma center rotation at Lynchburg General Hospital in the fall of 2022. The pace of that setting taught her the value of listening: it's easy to lean on someone else's first impression of a patient instead of hearing the person in front of you, and avoiding that kind of anchoring bias is a thread that still runs through how she practices.
She earned her B.S. in Human Nutrition, Foods and Exercise from Virginia Tech (2019), magna cum laude with honors, co-authoring undergraduate research on the ketogenic diet's role in managing Type 2 diabetes. After graduating, she moved to New York City, working in interventional pain management and urgent care, before moving back to Virginia in 2021 for PA school, earning her MPAM (Master of Physician Assistant Medicine) from the University of Lynchburg PA School of Medicine (2023).
Her clinical training built real clinical decision-making and critical thinking skills, not shadowing: seeing patients independently, working up a differential and plan, then presenting to a preceptor who'd sign off, accept it, or push it further with direct feedback. That training earned her "Experienced PA" ratings across many of her 11 clinical rotations, including an additional emergency medicine elective on top of her required rotations, alongside gastroenterology and anesthesia, and a humanitarian medical mission in Oaxaca, Mexico.
With both parents physicians, medicine was always familiar to her. She seriously considered medical school, pharmacy school, and physical therapy school before choosing PA, drawn to its combination of medicine, direct patient care, and room to move across different areas of it. She's never regretted it. She loves being a PA.
She's a member of the American Academy of Physician Assistants (AAPA) and the New York State Society of Physician Assistants (NYSSPA).
In the media (December 2024): featured on CBS News New York, speaking on holiday flu season and when to seek care.
Outside the clinic, she's usually planning her next trip, at a concert, reading, or spending time with friends and family.
PA school graduation, August 2023
A 21-year-old male patient came into urgent care with chest pain that had been present for five weeks, already seen once elsewhere and diagnosed at that time with costochondritis. He'd been prescribed symptomatic treatment for it with no response, and otherwise denied trying anything else to relieve the symptoms. He denied ever being diagnosed with or treated for TB before. He arrived with a chest X-ray and labs already done, but no one had gone over the results with him. Laura reviewed them herself, then went over the findings directly with him: the radiology report described old, calcified tissue in his lungs as "chronic," with no prior imaging to confirm that. Rather than take that read at face value, she ordered a follow-up work-up, including a Quantiferon Gold blood test. The Quantiferon Gold came back positive. With no signs of active disease and no prior history of treatment, it was diagnosed as latent tuberculosis, and he started treatment. Not every finding gets caught on initial clinical presentation, and that's ok, what matters is not letting go of a case until the clinical picture is actually clear.
More case studies →A big part of what Laura brings to a clinical team goes beyond direct patient care. At MiDoctor, a physician-owned, hybrid primary care/urgent care private practice, she identified and led the removal of a routine urinalysis from the standard annual wellness template, a small change that reduced unnecessary antibiotic prescribing while also reducing MA and provider workload. Over her tenure there, her own patient volume grew from roughly 2.5 to 3.5 patients an hour, a consistent, documented trend, without trading away the quality of care behind it.
A similar pattern showed up with how the practice sent controlled substance prescriptions. For years, that had meant a physical security token, the standard the practice had used for as long as anyone could remember. When her own token stopped working, rather than just solving it for herself, she identified Authy as a way to verify identity and send controlled substances virtually, a simpler, more reliable fix that replaced the token system for the whole practice.
