Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

What to Show on Your Waiting Room Television Set

Part of the beauty of urgent care is that patients spend less time waiting to be seen. Even minimal time spent waiting can be made more pleasant—thus enhancing the patient experience—with access to magazines, newspapers, television, and refreshments to alleviate uncertainty, boredom, and aggravation. If you’ve added a television to the media offered to patients, consider carefully what they’ll be watching. Generally, urgent care centers display three types of programming: • Cable news (eg, CNN, …

Collecting Your Own Patient Experience Data May Be More Help than Yelp

Probably more than for any other setting, patients rely on information they find online before deciding to visit an urgent care clinic. If you have stellar reviews on Yelp or other online review platforms, you’re in good shape, but the randomness of such sources can be a problem. Sentara Healthcare took matters into its own hands by surveying its own urgent care patients, resulting in 10,000 responses, and posting their results online. Working with National …

Urgent Care Center Finds Happy Patients, Not Competition in Telemedicine

One urgent care center’s competition is another center’s opportunity. In this case, Lexington, SC-based Doctor’s Care is finding that telemedicine is increasing patient satisfaction and reducing wait times, not keeping potential customers away from its clinics. The key is that the company facilitates the virtual visits on both ends: If one center is unusually busy and another has no wait time, the patient who is already on site at location A has the option of …

UCA Webinar: Taking Measure of Patient Satisfaction

The key to gaining patient loyalty is ensuring patient satisfaction. But how do you measure that—outside of noticing that you don’t have many repeat visits? One of the earliest and best-regarded entrants into the urgent care market, David Stern, MD will suggest approaches in Measuring Patient Satisfaction: Keeping It Simple, a one-hour webinar to be hosted by the Urgent Care Association (UCA) February 18 at 1 p.m., Central. Dr. Stern is CEO of Practice Velocity, …

Patient Satisfaction Surveys: Seeing Opportunities in Our Failures

Lee A. Resnick, MD, FAAFP It is well known, and exhaustively preached, that a satisfied customer will tell 2-3 people while a dissatisfied one will tell 8-10 (with some estimates as high as 20). Measuring and tracking patient satisfaction has become a focus of most every practice owner, much to the chagrin of their employees, who often view this as a way to publicly embarrass and unfairly harass the staff. And yet, whether we are …

Post-Visit Follow-up Calls: Improving Patient Satisfaction, Center Profitability and Clinical Outcomes

Urgent message: Call-backs within 24 to 48 hours of discharge can identify potential complications, ensure that instructions are followed, and reinforce a positive visit experience. ALAN A. AYERS, MBA, MAcc, Experity Introduction Urgent care centers provide immediate medical attention to patients who feel their symptoms are too pressing to wait for an appointment with their primary care physician, but not serious enough to warrant a visit to the emergency room (ER). With extended night/weekend hours, …

October 2011

Developing Data: October, 2011

These data from the 2010 Urgent Care Benchmarking Survey are based on responses of 1,691 US urgent care centers; 32% were UCA members. The survey was limited to “full-fledged urgent care centers,” the qualifications for which included accepting walk-ins during all hours of operation, as well as having a licensed provider on site, x-ray and labs on site, the ability to administer IV fluids and perform minor procedures, and being open seven days a week, …

Abstracts In Urgent Care: October, 2008

A Short Video About What to Expect in the ED Increases Patient Satisfaction Key point: Showing the video to patients in the ED waiting room increased their satisfaction with the ED experience. Citation: Papa L, Seaberg DC, Rees E, et al. Does a waiting room video about what to expect during an emergency department visit improve patient satisfaction? CJEM. 2008;10:347-354. Assessment of patient satisfaction has become a component of physician and emergency department evaluation. Investigators …