‘Alive’ or ‘Dead,’ Urgent Care Is Making Headlines for Its Resiliency and Growth

Anyone who works in urgent care and saw an industry article published recently under The Business Journals umbrella was probably taken aback by a headline that began Urgent Care Is Dead. Given that this was followed by Long Live Urgent Care, it seems the author of the headline was trading on the old expression The king is dead, long live the king for shock value. If you read the article, though, you were probably pleasantly surprised to see that it was actually fairly positive, detailing how the growth of the entrepreneurial industry accelerated once larger, more established entities like regional and national healthcare systems saw the tremendous potential for a new revenue stream. It also detailed steps ZoomCare has taken toward providing a “frictionless” experience for the patient. While those steps (such as crafting an image of the prototypical urgent care customer and trying to figure out how to cater to their needs) might not work for all, we can probably all agree that friction—anything that constitutes a hiccup in a smooth experience—is likely to detract from a patient’s positive impression of the urgent care center they visit. JUCM has addressed this challenge in an article entitled Competing for Patients in a Digitally Connected World. You can read it now in our archive.