A doc! Stat! People want their appointments now, at their convenience, and new Web sites and programs are making it so.

Struggling with a hacking cough that kept getting worse, Paul Spelman needed to see a doctor in January - and fast. His wife was just weeks away from giving birth to their first child.

But Spelman, 30, a graduate student at the Wharton School, didn't have a family doctor in Philadelphia. So when his cough woke him up early one morning, he searched online for a quick appointment in the city.

Spelman landed on the DocAsap.com Web site, a start-up founded last summer by Wharton graduates that promises users same-day appointments. He scheduled a doctor visit for about six hours later. After mild bronchitis was diagnosed, Spelman began a course of antibiotics and his cough quickly improved. "The reason that I was happy with the service was just the fact that it was so immediate," he said.

DocAsap.com is part of a growing number of initiatives across the region that often send sick, or healthy, patients to doctors on the same day. From doctor practices to retail clinics to hospital systems, the quick-appointment trend is growing, said physician Lori Heim, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians.

"It's definitely part of our society now," she said. A 2009 academy survey found that 62 percent of practices nationally use same-day or open-access scheduling.

The reason? "Patients want to be seen when they want to be seen," Heim said. "Convenience has become a very dominant force in every marketplace."

And as patients' lives have grown busier, so have physicians' practices. Last year, the average wait time for five specialties in Philadelphia was 27 days - the second-longest, after Boston - of 15 cities surveyed by the firm Merritt Hawkins & Associates.

Dermatologists and obstetrician-gynecologists made patients wait the longest, 47 and 46 days respectively, in the Philadelphia region.

On top of that, South Jersey is facing a potential doctor deficit. Every county in South Jersey except Camden has fewer primary-care doctors than the national average, according to the New Jersey Council of Teaching Hospitals.

Faced with those factors, the creators of DocAsap.com focused on increasing access. "It's not just a painkiller kind of a situation," said founder Puneet Maheshwari. "We are being used for convenience as well."