Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

My Patient Wants to Ruin My Reputation—Now How Do I Fix It?

Urgent message: When a patient says, ‘I had a bad experience,’ you should hear, ‘I know how you can improve your service.’ Adopt that mindset and you’ll start to welcome even negative feedback—and learn to use it to your advantage. Did you know there are some urgent care centers who live to get patient complaints? Before we delve into why you should adopt a similar mindset, let’s look at why an urgent care exists. In …

Telemedicine Helps Reduce Overuse of Emergency Rooms—Could Urgent Care, Too?

A telemedicine ambulance triage system is helping to keep nonemergent cases out of the emergency room in Houston—perhaps indicating one more way urgent care could contribute to improving access to affordable, quality care for patients with non–life-threatening concerns. A briefing on Advisory Board notes that the city’s ED wait times were among the worst in the country 10 years ago, thanks to up to 50% of patients, in effect, seeking primary care in their local …

Access to Urgent Care Leads Improvements in Veterans’ Healthcare

Military veterans’ access to healthcare took a huge leap forward last year—and urgent care was a big factor, according to a new study by the University of Pittsburgh Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business and the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy, Program Evaluation and Research Unit (PERU). Working in conjunction with the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA), the researchers concluded that MyVA Access, implemented in 2015, established sustainable solutions within VA facilities to …

Are Health Systems Missing the Boat on Urgent Care Referrals?

Despite ongoing growth in the number of urgent care centers, many institutions still fail to see the profitable big picture of aligning with urgent care, or of opening locations of their own. A study by the University of Minnesota and Urgent Care Partners (UCP) reveals that healthcare providers are not actively coordinating the growing urgent care primary care channel, or effectively managing downstream referrals. The UCP Urgent Care Survey found that 66% of urgent care …

Patients Can’t Wait? Try to Keep Them ‘in the Family’

If patients walk out the door because the wait in your clinic is too long, that doesn’t have to signal lost business. You can still capture the revenue that would have been generated on the spot and maintain good customer service by encouraging them to visit another of your company’s locations. Take Intermountain Healthcare (IHC), which operates 31 InstaCare/KidsCare centers across Utah. Within the Salt Lake Valley, these urgent care locations are typically no more …

What to Show on Your Waiting Room Television Set

Part of the beauty of urgent care is that patients spend less time waiting to be seen. Even minimal time spent waiting can be made more pleasant—thus enhancing the patient experience—with access to magazines, newspapers, television, and refreshments to alleviate uncertainty, boredom, and aggravation. If you’ve added a television to the media offered to patients, consider carefully what they’ll be watching. Generally, urgent care centers display three types of programming: • Cable news (eg, CNN, …

Collecting Your Own Patient Experience Data May Be More Help than Yelp

Probably more than for any other setting, patients rely on information they find online before deciding to visit an urgent care clinic. If you have stellar reviews on Yelp or other online review platforms, you’re in good shape, but the randomness of such sources can be a problem. Sentara Healthcare took matters into its own hands by surveying its own urgent care patients, resulting in 10,000 responses, and posting their results online. Working with National …

Urgent Care Center Finds Happy Patients, Not Competition in Telemedicine

One urgent care center’s competition is another center’s opportunity. In this case, Lexington, SC-based Doctor’s Care is finding that telemedicine is increasing patient satisfaction and reducing wait times, not keeping potential customers away from its clinics. The key is that the company facilitates the virtual visits on both ends: If one center is unusually busy and another has no wait time, the patient who is already on site at location A has the option of …

UCA Webinar: Taking Measure of Patient Satisfaction

The key to gaining patient loyalty is ensuring patient satisfaction. But how do you measure that—outside of noticing that you don’t have many repeat visits? One of the earliest and best-regarded entrants into the urgent care market, David Stern, MD will suggest approaches in Measuring Patient Satisfaction: Keeping It Simple, a one-hour webinar to be hosted by the Urgent Care Association (UCA) February 18 at 1 p.m., Central. Dr. Stern is CEO of Practice Velocity, …

Patient Satisfaction Surveys: Seeing Opportunities in Our Failures

Lee A. Resnick, MD, FAAFP It is well known, and exhaustively preached, that a satisfied customer will tell 2-3 people while a dissatisfied one will tell 8-10 (with some estimates as high as 20). Measuring and tracking patient satisfaction has become a focus of most every practice owner, much to the chagrin of their employees, who often view this as a way to publicly embarrass and unfairly harass the staff. And yet, whether we are …

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