The table above shows the percentage of patients within an average day who arrived during each hour of operations, based on more than 13,000,000 patient encounters from January 1 to March 31, 2024, recorded in the Experity EMR. A patient arriving anywhere between 7:00AM and 7:59AM, for example, is categorized as arriving during the 7:00AM hour.Â
This data is useful in determining staffing levels and opening hours. If the number of patient arrivals per hour exceeds the number of patients the clinical providers and staff can serve in an hour, wait times will result. Otherwise, if the number of patient arrivals falls
short of provider and staff productivity, the result is costly unused capacity. Understanding patient arrival patterns can enable an urgent care operator to maximize productivity by expanding or shifting opening hours and/or adding to or reducing the number of staff at various times.
Less than 0.4% of urgent care visits arrived before 7:00AM or after 9:00PM. Thus, the distribution of arrivals reflects the fact that most urgent care centers are open from 8:00AM to 8:00PM daily. In the analysis, outliers do not materially change the visit distribution.
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