Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

How Patients Find a Healthcare Professional

Every business—universally, in every field—survives on its ability to draw the right customers. For healthcare professionals, that means patients. In this age of on-demand service and walk-in appointments, more than at any other time, providers are also called upon to be astute marketers who know how to help patients find them when they need care. Making the effort doesn’t always assure success, however. So, it may be helpful to know that there are new, independent …

Hard Data on Why Patients Keep Flocking to Urgent Care Centers

Urgent care insiders know our industry continues to grow and evolve, and understand that convenience, cost, and quality of care are what keeps patients coming back. Data from outside the industry diving a bit deeper into the “why” of patient volume has been a bit scarce, however. A Harris Poll commissioned by Mercy Health System of Southeastern Pennsylvania takes a step toward remedying that shortage, however. Not surprisingly, a strong majority (66%) of the 1,700 …

Gathering Metrics on Pediatric Urgent Care: Convenient Hours

In this issue of JUCM, we inaugurate a new focus on treating children in the urgent care center. This will manifest in the form of semiregular articles by clinicians who’ve made the commitment to focus on pediatric urgent care. The first, Approach to the Child with Chest Pain, appears on page XX. We are not alone in recognizing that urgent care is ideally suited to the treatment of children whose presenting symptoms don’t warrant a …

Come October, Come the Flu

On paper, flu season starts next month, meaning it’s an ideal time to start reminding patients they’ll need flu shots (and that you’ll be happy to provide one). While the majority of children tend to get their shots toward the end of the season according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the distribution has been more evenly distributed for adults over the past few flu seasons, as seen in Figure 1, below. The …

Opioid Visits Keep Skyrocketing

Driven partially by increased use of the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl, patients continued to flood emergency rooms across the country in increasing numbers over the 10-year period ending in 2014, according to data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ; see graph below). The implications for urgent care are A) that some of those patients surely received their first opioid prescriptions in an urgent care center legitimately for treatment of acute pain, underscoring …

How often do patients utilize urgent care?

Urgent care thrives on repeat visits and positive word-of-mouth from loyal patients. Although many urgent care centers track the percentage of new vs established patients—those who have been seen in the past 3 years—few measure frequency of use by individual patients. This is an important measure used in other service businesses, however, based on the assumption that customers who patronize their favorite businesses more often also spend more money, and encourage others (either in person and …

Are Alternative Payment Models Catching On?

There’s little evidence that emerging payment models (eg, concierge medicine, cash-only practices, and accountable care organizations [ACOs]) are gaining any serious traction in urgent care—but that doesn’t mean they’re not making headway elsewhere. ACOs, in particular, are growing in usage among physicians, according to the Medscape Physician Compensation Report 2017. Usage of cash-only and concierge models is also growing, albeit much more modestly, as the graph below shows. Data source: Medscape Physician Compensation Report 2017. …

Demand for Medical Assistants Will Outstrip Supply by 2024

Medical assistants (MAs) are the core of urgent care’s clinical support workforce (as noted in Cost Effective Staffing with Medical Assistants in the January, 2017 edition of JUCM; see https://www.jucm.com/cost-effective-staffing-medical-assistants/). However, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, demand for MAs is expected to outstrip supply over the next decade, just as the aging baby-boom population will increase demand for physician services—especially in the primary care setting, where the bulk of MAs work. For urgent …

How Patients Pay Their Bills

Of the survey participants, most (78%) manage billing with in-house staff, while the rest contract for their billing services or use other methods. Such billing efforts cost an average amount of $215.91 per patient—about $3,336,967 per site and $8,876,333 per urgent care center. Small wonder, then, that 14% of respondents cannot yet call their business “profitable.”

Urgent Care Occupational Medicine Efforts Should Focus on the Public Sector

Over two-thirds of urgent care centers offer a blend of occupational medicine services (generally defined as treatment of workers compensation injuries, conducting physicals for compliance or fitness for duty, and substance abuse testing), according to the Urgent Care Association.1 One challenge for those that do is that the overall incidence of workplace injuries has declined significantly this century, due to an overall shift from a manufacturing to a service and information economy, the offshoring/outsourcing of …