Urgent Care Update The Quality of Care at Urgent Care Centers Urgent message: New data reveal that urgent care compares favor- ably with other practice environments when it comes to select key quality indicators. Robin M. Weinick, PhD, Steffanie J. Bristol, BS, and Catherine M. DesRoches, DrPH D w w w. j u c m . c o m On the hospital side, most measures focus on either in- patient services (such as hand washing or postsurgi- cal infection rates) or on care for a very narrow range of conditions (such as provid- ing aspirin for patients with acute myocardial infarc- tion). Again, this makes such measures less applicable to urgent care centers. As part of a larger project to survey urgent care cen- ters and provide bench- marking data, we asked cen- ters to tell us about a variety of activities related to qual- ity of care, including how they are integrated with the rest of the healthcare system, their use of clinical practice guidelines, and how they measure quality of care and patient satisfaction. © Photos: iStockPhoto.com; Digital composite: Tom DePrenda eveloping methods to assess the quality of healthcare in any clini- cal area is a complicated affair. Many individuals have devoted large parts of their careers to quality measurement, and several national organizations— such as The Joint Commis- sion and the National Qual- ity Forum—exist solely for the purposes of measuring and ensuring the quality of healthcare delivered to pa- tients in the U.S. In the urgent care arena, however, the field is less well developed. Very few meas- ures that have been devel- oped for ambulatory care apply to the urgent care set- ting, with its focus on episodic care, because historically such measures have focused on providing longitudinal care for a panel of patients. These include common measures such as those related to HgA1c testing for di- abetic patients, the initiation and maintenance of an- tidepressant use, and utilization and timeliness of pre- ventive screening tests such as mammograms. What We Did As noted in the January issue of JUCM, we identified urgent care centers for our benchmarking initiative us- ing three methods. 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 | Fe b r u a r y 2 0 0 9 27