More Studies Are Including Urgent Care Visits as a Data Point. Are Researchers Finally Getting on Board?

As regular readers know, JUCM is unique in that it regularly publishes original, urgent care-specific research. Most (if not all) of that research has been conducted by urgent care providers and operators. Historically, however, urgent care has been all but invisible to mainstream medical researchers. There are indications that could be changing, however, as lately there have been several pieces of research conducted not by urgent care entities, but more traditional bodies that are using urgent care data visits as a data point in a larger view. The most recent and probably most prominent was published by The New England Journal of Medicine and featured in a report on ABC News. The study’s aim was to assess the effect of the “Eat, Sleep, Console” approach to involving parents more in the care of babies born to opioid users, specifically whether doing so, with nursing supervision, would measurably effect in-hospital care, discharge, and visits to emergency rooms and urgent care centers postdischarge. While the researchers plan to follow those babies through 2 years of age to monitor their health, there’s already good news in that after following the infants for 3 months there have been no ill effects as measured by urgent care and ED visits or hospitalizations. The unintended benefit for urgent care is that there’s more evidence that its place in the medical community may be on firmer ground than ever before.