Marketplace

Two years ago this month, we reported on the opening of an urgent care facility within the confines of D/FW International Airport in Dallas/Fort Worth, TX. The thinking at the time was that the combination of roughly 65,000 people working on site and around 100 times that number—65 million people—passing through the airport yearly made for a substantial customer base. Another operation followed suit, at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. However viable as the …

Urgent care operators have gotten more competitive with each other in recent years, working tirelessly to distinguish themselves and investing in new technologies to ensure the overall patient experience continues to exceed expectations. They’ve also had to make it clear to patients that urgent care offers a wider range of services than retail drugstores as those companies have tried to get a piece of the walk-in care action. There’s another setting that’s gone somewhat under …

High costs are forcing consumers to think long and hard about where they want to go when the need to see a healthcare provider, according to data newly released by Loyale Healthcare—which dovetails with the growing availability (and popularity) of urgent care. The authors of the report note that urgent care centers “represent an increasingly popular low-cost alternative to hospital emergency departments.” Further, their utility has been amplified by “the Millennial generation’s preferences for convenience …

Walgreens appears to be working harder to transition from a retail health provider to one that offers actual urgent care/primary care services, if its most recent moves are any indication. The company revealed it’s going to work with Humana to open two primary care centers for Medicare patients in existing Kansas City-area stores by the end of this year—doubling the number of locations participating in a pilot program that began in 2018. Each will have …

When someone with cancer experiences unexplained pain, nausea, or any number of symptoms that could be alarming given their condition, their first reaction may be to call their oncologist. The problem is, they’re often not available spontaneously. The next logical option, historically, has been the emergency room. We all know that sitting in a crowded waiting room full of sick people for hours is definitely not what the doctor would have ordered, though. As you’ve …

The key attributes that have allowed urgent care to flourish are its ability to provide clinically excellent care in a way that is less time-consuming and lower cost than the emergency room, and more readily accessible than traditional office-based practices. That’s what we have to offer. The question is, how well does that match up with the rationale patients use when selecting their site of care? Pretty well, it turns out, if a new study …

Today, SouthStar Urgent Care has 11 clinics in relatively small markets in Louisiana. By year’s end, they expect to have 19; come 2020, they’re adding another 18, tripling their location count in the space of a few months. SouthStar’s new president and chief operating officer says the sudden, dramatic growth is a sign of the company’s commitment to Louisiana and its passion for supporting communities. While that may be, urgent care watchers also recognize it …

Publications as diverse as Black Enterprise magazine and The Birmingham Times in Alabama have picked up on a real urgent care success story—one that should resonate with the entire healthcare industry and the country as a whole. In the seat of some of the civil rights movements’ most contentious (and violent) moments, a young, female, African-American urgent care professional has co-founded a pediatric urgent care center. Tiffany Alexander, 27, also serves as the operations manager …

HCA Healthcare continues to expand its footprint by acquiring existing locations from other companies—this time filling its basket with 24 MedSpring urgent care centers previously owned by Fresenius Medical Care. The locations are in markets where HCA already has urgent care facilities, so the latest move should allow HCA to offer services to more patients more conveniently, rather than stretching to cover a broader geographic area. HCA’s network of urgent care centers will now include …

In a bold attempt to wrangle Millennial patients in search of a healthcare setting that meets their needs, a company called Forward is billing itself as the “Next Gen Doctor’s Office.” Its website promises whole-body wellness, a personalized health plan, and unlimited office visits (and “app support”). Essentially, it’s a direct, membership-based primary care model that offers 24/7 on-demand access via telemedicine. The obvious question for JUCM News readers is, what does this mean for …