Quality Drives the Decision When Patients Choose Urgent Care Over a Retail Clinic

Every patient covets convenience and speed when they make choices about where to seek immediate care. Urgent care and retail clinics both offer those attributes. Just as much (if not more), though, patients want to know they’re going to get the quality of care they need—and that’s where they see a difference between retail and urgent care, according to a new study from WD Partners. The research actually compared those two segments along with primary care in several categories, coming up with an overall net promoter score (NPS) based on perceived quality of care, availability, speed, convenience, staff, insurance coverage, and price. Urgent care outpaced retail in every category; in fact, retail was the only one of the three segments to receive a negative NPS. Among the 2,600 respondents to the survey, 28% said they had visited an urgent care center over the previous 6 months, compared with 12% who said they had received care at a retail clinic. Younger patients were most likely to prefer urgent care and retail over traditional PCP services.