Practice Management
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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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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RETAIL CLINIC ROOFTOPS BY HOST Between May 2023 and June 2026, the number of health clinics hosted in retail settings in the United States fell from 1,750 to 1,166. This represents a 33% overall decline from the 2023 peak. The decline also includes a recent 15% drop since our previous analysis, which found 1,370 sites in operation from May 2023 through December 2024.1 The contraction began when CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart announced closures and has …
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Over the past year, I’ve written about telling our story, strengthening our voice, proving our value, and, most recently, Urgent Care’s evolution from a convenient alternative to an essential part of everyday healthcare. As I look at where we stand today, I believe we’re entering another important chapter. Healthcare is changing rapidly, and nearly every trend points in the same direction. Primary care physicians are retiring faster than they can be replaced. New physicians aren’t …
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Brad Laymon, PA-C, CPC, CEMC Every clinician I work with wants to do right by their patients and their charts. Yet across the urgent care systems I consult with, the same quiet leaks show up repeatedly. None of these are dramatic errors. They may never trigger an audit flag. They simply shave a level off the visit, encounter after encounter, until the lost revenue becomes real. The most common leak I see is an abnormal …
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As I continue to meet with operators, clinicians, policymakers, employers, and healthcare leaders, I continue to hear many of the same challenges: reimbursement challenges, rising healthcare costs, workforce shortages, limited access to primary care, and growing pressure on emergency departments. At the same time, I’m hearing something else: growing recognition of the important role Urgent Care plays in addressing these challenges. For years, Urgent Care was often viewed as an alternative, a convenient option when …
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