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By Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc — President of Urgent Care Consultants; Senior Editor of The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine
The 2026 Urgent Care Association Convention convened in Chicago this April under the theme “Amplify” — and across roughly fifty clinical and practice management sessions, that word kept landing on the same point: amplify the clinician, don’t replace them. Artificial intelligence, the tonal undercurrent of nearly every track, was framed less as an autonomous force than as a lever applied to a human hand. As Brad Laymon, PA-C, put it during his crowd-favorite “head-to-head with ChatGPT on E/M coding” (which Laymon won 2–1): “Artificial intelligence can assist, but only human intelligence understands nuance.”
Clinical Track: Stewardship, Pediatrics, and Bulletproof Notes
Pediatrics dominated the clinical agenda. Patrick Dolan, MD, FAAP, FCUCM, used his “Top 10 Articles” session to push antibiotic-duration shortening and re-examined steroid use in croup, while Kathryn Crampton, MD, dismantled four entrenched myths in pediatric urgent care — chief among them the reflexive labeling of viral exanthems as amoxicillin allergies. Eric Weinberg, MD, FAAP, of PM Pediatric Care offered a structured fever algorithm for the well-appearing 2-month to 2-year-old, and pediatric radiologist Mark Bittman, MD, anchored the imaging stream with two sessions on commonly missed pediatric fractures and the disciplined reading of pediatric chest and abdominal films.
The diagnostic stewardship thread ran in parallel. Christopher Chao, MD, and Joe Hwang, PA-C, used paired case studies in their respiratory and STI testing sessions to illustrate how negative antigen tests are routinely misinterpreted in elderly and immunocompromised patients. Rajesh Geria, MD, in a separate talk on rapid antigen testing, reminded attendees that “it’s probably viral” — once a reassurance — now reads to patients as dismissal, and that the CDC continues to estimate 30% of outpatient antibiotic prescriptions are unnecessary.
On the documentation side, Tracey Quail Davidoff, MD, FCUCM, returned with Defensive Charting Part II, citing closed-claims data showing 20% of malpractice cases trace to a documentation issue rather than a care issue — and offering a measured take on AI scribes: “Efficiency benefits are clear; accuracy and consistency remain to be seen.”
Practice Management Track: Workforce, Margin, and Quality at Scale
The practice management track was anchored by workforce anxiety. Lisa Bishop, DNP, MHA, opened her NP onboarding session with a comparison that landed hard — physicians arrive with 12,000–16,000 clinical training hours, PAs roughly 2,000, and NPs as few as 500 — arguing that structured onboarding, not licensure, closes that gap and saves $100,000 to $250,000 per APC turnover event. R. Scott Poston, BSN, MHA, then connected workforce churn directly to accreditation outcomes using UCA’s 2023–2025 cohort data, where annualized turnover ranged from 25% in small operators to 38% in 80+ clinic groups. His framing was the most quoted of the day: “Turnover doesn’t cause findings — unmanaged turnover does.” Brian L. Cruz, MD, MBA, FACEP, FCUCM, of McLeod Urgent Care reinforced the point in a separate culture-and-leadership session, citing the MIT Sloan analysis of 1.3 million Glassdoor reviews in which toxic culture was 10× more predictive of attrition than compensation.
Revenue-cycle and contracting talks pressed a similar point about scale. Tammy Mallow, CEO of Mallow Consulting, modeled how a 3% commercial rate increase yields ~$115,000 per clinic annually with no operational change, while Wayzen Lin, CEO of RevOps Health, estimated 10% of urgent care payments are lost annually to silent reconciliation errors. Roger Wu, MD, MBA, FACEP, of Medraki shared findings from 16,236 chart reviews across 678 clinicians — abnormal vital signs were unaddressed and unrepeated 27.6% of the time, the largest measurable clinical gap in the dataset, and the foundation for UCA’s draft 2025–2026 Quality Metrics covering EKG for chest pain, CT for anticoagulated head trauma, and epinephrine for anaphylaxis.
A patient-experience thread ran alongside the operations talks. Rajesh Geria, MD, used a second session to address perceived medical gaslighting — distinct from intentional dismissal but produced by the same 12-to-20-minute visits, missing prior records, and rushed discharges — arguing that reflexive reassurances now read as disrespect to today’s urgent care patient. Charlotte Francis, MBA, MSN, APRN, FNP-C, of Texas Health Breeze closed her patient-experience session with a line worth posting on the wall: “Reviews drive referrals, and referrals drive volume.”
Looking Ahead: Master the 95%
What captured the room’s strategic mood was a refusal of futurism. Jonathan S. Halpert, MD, FACEP, CEO of Priority 1 Urgent Care, used his Bread-and-Butter Urgent Care: Mastering the 95% session to argue that the operators who win this decade are the ones who own the fundamentals today: the disciplined respiratory exam, the right test for the right pathogen, the templated chart that holds up in court. Among his “Rules of the Road” was a working clinician’s reminder that the floor of the practice is medicine, not technology — “any drug can do anything to anyone at any time” — followed by his version of the Centor criteria for pharyngitis, refined across decades of urgent care shifts.
The arc of UCA 2026 was less about any single technology than about a re-centering. The clinician who reads the x-ray, addresses the abnormal vital, and explains the negative test in language a patient trusts is — still — the asset to amplify. Everything else is scaffolding.
