Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Competitive Analysis to Stand Above the Crowd

Urgent message: Providing high-quality care and good service is not necessarily enough to attract and keep patients, especially if those patients can take their pick from among several urgent care centers. More and more, urgent care operators need to be aware of how their competitors operate. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Practice Velocity All too often, urgent care entrepreneurs operate in a vacuum. They feel that if they offer a well-appointed facility with good signage, …

Getting Paid: Ten Steps to Reducing Accounts Receivable

Urgent message: Unlike businesses that expect—and receive—full payment at the time services or goods are secured, urgent care centers often wait for full payment from third-party payors. Efficient management of accounts receivable is crucial to the center’s financial viability. By Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Practice Velocity Urgent care centers—which appeal to consumers on the basis of high-visibility locations, extended hours, and walk-in convenience—are often compared to “retail” businesses. Unlike stores, restaurants, and other “retailers” …

Agencies Can Extend Clinical Recruiting and Staffing Capabilities

Urgent message: Medical staffing agencies extend an urgent care center’s recruiting and staffing capabilities with solutions to fill all operating hours with qualified providers. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Practice Velocity Introduction The United States faces a shortage of primary care and emergency medicine physicians – the provider force feeding urgent care. When an urgent care center has an insufficient number of providers to adequately cover its schedule, the patient experience suffers due to extended …

Protecting the Urgent Care Center from Sexual Harassment Claims

Urgent message: Sexual harassment claims can be costly for an urgent care operator, not tomention ruinous to a center’s reputation. An urgent care center should protect itself by having firm policies and procedures in place to prevent and resolve sexual harassment issues. Alan Ayers, MA, MAcc, Experity Sexual harassment emerged as a major human resources issue in the 1990s. Victims of alleged sexual harassment – who can be men or women – sometimes find sympathetic …

Building Urgent Care Referral Relationships Part 2: EDs, PCPs, and Specialists

Urgent message: Forging solid relationships with other clinicians in emergency, primary care, or specialty settings can help facilitate two-way referrals and prove beneficial to all parties involved – including patients. The second of two parts. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Overbooked primary care officers and time-consuming (not to mention costly) trips to the emergency room leave many patients frustrated and feeling they have no place left to turn when a medical condition requires immediate attention …

Building Urgent Care Referral Relationships: Pharmacies and Retail Host Clinics

Urgent message: Viewing other community healthcare providers (e.g., pharmacists) or even possible competitors (e.g., retail clinics) as referral sources can increase revenues and bolster the urgent care center’s place in the healthcare system. The first of two parts. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Urgent Care has evolved to the point that it is a vital part of a community’s healthcare infrastructure, offering access when primary care appointments are unavailable and relief when emergency rooms are …

Creating a Web Presence to Raise Awareness of Urgent Care

Urgent message: A robust – and effective – advertising campaign needs to take full advantage of all available media, with special consideration of online opportunities. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc In the past, advertising was a simple proposition; nearly everyone attached the same network television, read the same city newspapers, and searched for businesses in the Yellow Pages. But in recent years, such “mass marketing” has yielded to new marketing channels targeting the lifestyles and …

Putting Patients First: Redefining Quality in the Patient Experience

Urgent message: Patients are the ultimate judges of the quality of care you provide, and the opinions are likely to be swayed by factors that have little to do with your clinical expertise or skill. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Service industries – from retail stores to restaurants, hotels, and even banks – have embraced the customer’s point of view by meshing contemporary design, cutting-edge technology, and process engineering to develop services that are increasingly …

An Introduction to Urgent Care Advertising

Urgent message: Unlike many other practice models, urgent care must appeal directly to the customer to stay “top of mind” and be the first option the patient considers when a need arises. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Urgent care is a healthcare delivery channel built around the needs of consumers – “retail,” from a marketing perspective – with convenient locations, evening and weekend hours, walk-in service, the capability to treat a range of illness or …

The Front Office: Window to Your Practice

Urgent message: Patients will return again and again—and tell their friends, too—if your center’s manager and employees are unfailingly courteous, com petent, and thorough. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc, Experity If you’re planning to own and operate an urgent care center, you’re probably not thinking about managing an administrative office. Instead, you envision yourself hurrying between exam rooms, suturing cuts, setting fractures, and dispensing orders. Digging your way out of paperwork, refereeing staff disputes, tracking …