Urgent Care Grows in Massachusetts, but ED Visits Are Still Driving Up Healthcare Costs

As in other parts of the country, the number of urgent care centers and other walk-in facilities continues to grow in Massachusetts. That’s great news for our industry, but the potential for urgent care to positively affect healthcare spending there has yet to be fulfilled. The problem, also as in some other parts of the country, is that too many people are still going to the emergency room for nonemergent complaints, according to the Commonwealth’s Health Policy Commission. Over one third of patients surveyed admitted that they’ve gone to the ED even though they knew their chief complaint could have been handled in a lower-acuity (and lower cost) setting like an urgent care center. Overall, roughly 57% of those who visited the ED for nonemergent concerns said they did so because they couldn’t get an appointment with an office-based physician. However, 68% said that was because they needed to see someone after normal working hours—which, as we know, would likely be at an hour when they could visit an urgent care center. Few explanations were conjectured by the Commission, though one held that there’s a higher concentration of walk-in facilities, including retail clinics, in neighborhoods where the median income exceeds $78,000. That would not explain why around 40% of higher-income patients went to the ED when they could have been treated just as effectively in an urgent care center, however.