If the Patient Can’t Come to Urgent Care, Why Not Bring Urgent Care to the Patient?

Urgent care offers convenience that’s just not feasible in a traditional primary care practice, at a price far lower than the emergency room would charge for the same acuity-level of care. That’s why it’s caught on. Similarly, urgent care providers who offer occupational medicine services have found success in offering those benefits to local businesses, especially those whose work force engages in physical labor or has a public safety aspect to it (such as warehouses or long-haul truckers, respectively). There are other (probably unrecognized) niches in the broader marketplace, though, as Next Level Urgent Care is finding. With 15 locations in the expansive Houston marketplace, the company realized that even a convenient option like urgent care wouldn’t work for all their prospective patients all the time. So, they launched a new service called CareXtend that combines the key attributes of on-site care and virtual medicine. The service was just made available to an area school district. They didn’t “sell” it by pitching the idea in a cold call, though; the new initiative evolved out of a series of successes. The first came when Next Level started operating a cost-free clinic for Fort Bend (TX) County employees. Once the local government started seeing cost savings and found the care to be stellar, it was easy to sell a neighboring county on the idea. And after that, the Houston Independent School District invited the company in to provide care on school campuses. So, the innovative idea of CareXtend really grew out of old-fashioned commitment and hard work to provide traditional service to a series of customers. By moving ahead one step at a time, Next Level may have opened the door to a whole new level of service that will reap benefits both financially and promotionally; if an employee or student gets good care on the job or on campus, they’ll be more likely to visit one of Next Care’s locations when they’re home or out and about. This success story illustrates both the sound foundation urgent care is built on, but also the unlimited potential to create new ways of providing care and doing business.