Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Urgent Care Refers 1 Patient in 50 to the ED

Urgent Message: Urgent care sends roughly 1 patient in 50 to the emergency department. Most of those referrals involve symptoms that call for imaging, laboratory testing, or monitoring that the clinic cannot provide. Some are emergencies identified during the visit for an ordinary complaint. Keywords: emergency department referral; emergency department transfer; urgent care referral patterns; practice variation; clinical documentation; urgent care operations Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Consider a scenario in which a patient writes …

Size and Ownership of U.S. Urgent Care Centers, 2026

As of July 1, 2026, there were 14,495 urgent care centers in the United States, according to National Urgent Care Realty data. The charts above break down that footprint by the number of locations per operator, affiliation with a hospital or health system, private equity investment, and participation in a health system/private equity joint venture. From the data: 56% of urgent care centers are operated by groups of 10 or more locations, up from 54% …

The Future Is Being Built. Be Part of It.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to see our industry from several different perspectives. At the Patient Experience Symposium in Boston, Massachusetts, I joined healthcare leaders from across the country to discuss what I call “The Urgent Care Effect,” which is how our industry helped change what consumers expect from healthcare. More recently, I spent time with Urgent Care leaders at the Northeast Urgent Care Association (NERUCA) meeting, and our colleagues in …

Identifying the Limitations of Telehealth in Urgent Care

Kristin Boddu, DNP, APRN, FNP-C, CNE, COI Telehealth has drastically improved access to urgent care, allowing patients to seek evaluation for acute complaints without travel, time away from work, or many of the operational obstacles of in-person care. Federal telehealth guidance recognizes improved access, reduced travel, and time savings as important benefits.1 For clinicians practicing urgent care through telehealth, convenience comes with the responsibility of recognizing when the patient needs something a screen cannot provide. …

How Often Do Urgent Cares Close Unexpectedly?

The average urgent care center goes unexpectedly “dark” 2.3 days a year—which means it closed on a day it otherwise should have been open (eg, staff illness, building repair, power outage, etc.). And the range of unexpected closure days is wide. Centers run by operators that have only a single location experience unexpected closures 4.6 days a year. Centers with 76 or more locations have 1.7 days of unexpected closures per center per year. The …

Urgent Care Practice Varies More by Provider on Duty Than by Center, Payer, or Patient

Urgent Message: Urgent care operators may find practice variation in testing, imaging, referral, and coding among clinicians working in the same clinic. According to this data analysis, the reason for variation ultimately comes down to the decision making of the individual clinician rather than infrastructure, payer, or patient population. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Keywords: urgent care practice variation; provider variation; clinical practice patterns; diagnostic testing; referral patterns; evaluation and management coding; clinician performance Walk …

Beyond Convenience: Becoming a Healthcare Partner

For much of Urgent Care’s history, convenience was our calling card. Walk-in access, extended hours, 7-day availability, and locations close to where people live and work changed what patients expected from healthcare. Convenience helped build this field, but it won’t be the only thing defining our future. Last month, I wrote about the forces reshaping healthcare: growing challenges with primary care access, rising costs, pressure on emergency departments, and employers searching for better ways to …

A Historic Milestone for Urgent Care Nurse Practitioners: The Journey to Specialty Certification Begins

Lisa H. Bishop, DNP, MSN, MHA, FNP-BC, CDEO, FCUCM After years of persistence, collaboration, and advocacy, we have reached a historic milestone for the nurse practitioner profession and the specialty of urgent care. The American Academy of Nurse Practitioners Certification Board (AANPCB) has officially confirmed our petition to begin development of the first Urgent Care Nurse Practitioner Certification. This announcement represents far more than the creation of a new credential. It is the beginning of …

Are You Documenting For Comprehensive Care?

Brad Laymon, PA-C, CPC, CEMC Is there an opportunity to optimize for accurate billing when more comprehensive care is delivered? Clinicians ask me this question more often than almost any other, thinking they might be leaving money on the table. The honest answer is usually yes, but not the way most people expect. The opportunity rarely sits in doing more procedures. It sits in documentation that reflects the comprehensive care that was delivered during the …

Mandated Paid Sick Leave, FMLA, and the Complex Landscape of Absence Management

Urgent Message: To protect clinic continuity and avoid financial liabilities, urgent care operators must master the complex, overlapping patchwork of federal and state employee-leave laws to navigate paid-time-off traps, callouts, and defensible terminations. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Keywords: Family and Medical Leave Act; paid sick leave; paid time off; employee absence management; Americans with Disabilities Act; attendance policy The regulatory environment governing employee absence in the United States is a complex, overlapping patchwork of …

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