Urgent Care Update The Search for the Urgent Care Center Urgent message: Efforts to define and accurately count urgent care centers in the U.S.—which may be crucial to the industry’s continued growth—are ongoing, and will require the commitment of trade organizations and individual urgent care owners alike. Robin M. Weinick, PhD, Steffanie J. Bristol, BS, Jessica E. Marder, and Catherine M. DesRoches, DrPH O URGENT CARE CENTER © Photos: iStockPhoto.com; Digital composite: Tom DePrenda ur quest to provide ac- curate, scientifically rig- orous benchmarking data for urgent care centers began with the decision to conduct a sur- vey. Before you can admin- ister a survey, though, you need to be able to identify the individuals or organiza- tions that you want to an- swer your questions. Defining Urgent Care The first challenge was de- ciding what counts as an ur- gent care center. For exam- ple, consider three types of practices that one of us vis- ited early in 2008: Ⅲ Dr. A has a family practice and sees scheduled pa- tients, primarily. She provides the usual scope of primary care services. Located in a strip mall, her practice has a sign in the window that reads “walk- ins welcome.” Ⅲ Dr. B runs a storefront clinic. He sees walk-in 38 patients, primarily, although they do take some appoint- ments. He does not accept insurance, and charges $25 cash for a visit. He performs few procedures in his office. Ⅲ Dr. C describes his prac- tice as half family medicine, half urgent care. They do suturing, splinting, and casting on site, and have a dedicated room for x-rays and film storage. They’re open every evening, as well as every Saturday, and they have a significant occupa- tional medicine practice. It’s probably safe to say that Drs. A and B are not running urgent care cen- ters, but Dr. C is. To move beyond the “I know one when I see one” approach, however, we needed a formal definition of what would count and what would not. Working with the UCAOA Benchmarking Commit- tee and basing our definition on previous work, 1 we de- JUCM T h e J o u r n a l o f U r g e n t C a r e M e d i c i n e | J a n u a r y 2 0 0 9 w w w. j u c m . c o m