Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Highlights From SERUCA 2025: AI, Burnout, and The New Front Line of Care

Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc, President of Urgent Care Consultants and Senior Editor of JUCM. The Southeast Regional Urgent Care Association (SERUCA) 2025 conference, held November 14–15, 2025, in New Orleans, focused on urgent care’s most pressing challenges: technology, workforce well-being, and clinical quality through stewardship. This article highlights key takeaways for operators, vendors, and clinicians. Promoting Clinical Excellence Through Stewardship Stewardship was a recurring theme. In a session on antibiotic use, Steven Goldberg, MD, …

What Does ‘Standard of Care’ Mean from a Legal Compliance Perspective?

Urgent Message: Urgent care centers are not required to deliver the “best possible care” but rather an “acceptable” level of care, which is legally defined as the “standard of care.” Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Key Words: Standard of Care, Medical Malpractice, Medical Negligence, Legal Compliance, Disciplinary Action Medical malpractice occurs when a physician’s actions, or failure to act, during patient care don’t meet accepted medical standards and cause harm to the patient. To be …

The Scale of Orthopedic Urgent Care

As of August 12, 2025, there are 726 orthopedic urgent care (OUC) rooftops in the United States, according to National Urgent Care Realty and Urgent Care Consultants. Based on centers added since January 1, 2025, the estimated annual rooftop growth for 2025 is 10.9%. The charts highlight the market’s structure: Most sites operate without hospital affiliation, and OUC is largely a scaled, multisite business rather than single-location clinics. Only 9% of OUC rooftops are single …

What is an Urgent Care Operator’s Liability Concerning Trash Disposal?

Urgent Message: Medical and non-medical waste produced by urgent care centers must be handled in accordance with federal, state, and local regulations. The United States Supreme Court has ruled that garbage is public property once it is set on the curb.1 The Supreme Court opined that “[i]t is common knowledge that plastic garbage bags left on or at the side of a public street are readily accessible to animals, children, scavengers, snoops, and other members …

My AI Journey and Practical Lessons You Can Use Now

Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc My artificial intelligence (AI) awakening wasn’t a lightning bolt but a slow current—a series of small jolts. I kept encountering people who seemingly talked about AI all the time—fluent in the lingo and referred to by others as “AI gurus.” From their conversations, it was clear they were putting AI into real operations—analyzing data, streamlining tasks, even building custom AI tools and agents. But it was still as if they …

Credit Card on File Speeds Collections, Decreases Bad Debt

The credit-card-on-file practice requires a patient’s credit card at the time of service, which is used to cover balances after an insurance claim adjudicates. In addition to increasing total collections, charging the card on file also enables an urgent care to capture payments more quickly than time-consuming and costly collection efforts, such as mailing statements. In an Experity analysis of 392,699 comparable Blue Cross Blue Shield urgent care visits in 2024, 80% of patient responsibility …

Red Flags When Selling Your Urgent Care Practice

Urgent Message: Offers to buy urgent care centers typically follow due diligence processes, and the assets are valued within predictable market ranges. Offers to purchase a center that fall outside usual and customary parameters should be evaluated with scrutiny and skepticism. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Selling your urgent care business may be an opportunity to reap a return on your investment. However, there could be buyers looking to take advantage of your enthusiasm and …

Pediatric Populations Represent 29% of Urgent Care Patients

Over the 12-month period ending June 15, 2025, 29% of urgent care patients were children and young adults aged 21 years or younger, while 71% were patients aged 22 years or older, according to an exclusive analysis of 35 million patient visits recorded in the Experity EMR. Further, the chart demonstrates the age breakdown of the population of children and young adults who visited urgent care. This analysis omits visits for employer-paid services and workers …

Northeast Leads in Lyme-Related Diagnoses in Urgent Care

In the United States, 8 common species of ticks exist in different geographies that present risk of transmitting more than 10 different types of diseases. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the most common ticks associated with human disease transmission in the United States are the American dog tick (Dermacentor variabilis, or D. similis), also known as a “wood tick,” and the blacklegged tick (Ixodes scapularis), commonly referred to as …

Private Equity Investment In Urgent Care, By Number Of Centers, 2025

Fifteen years after the initial private equity platform investments in NextCare, FastMed, and MD Now, the number of urgent care rooftops backed by private equity has grown to 18% of the nation’s 14,423 urgent care centers, as of May 12, 2025. The total number of urgent care rooftops with private equity investment grew by 11% from 2,359 last reported by JUCM in April 2024 to today’s 2,622. Much of this growth has occurred organically and …

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