Practice Management
Patients visit urgent care centers because they’re convenient places to get quality care, and often at a time when the primary care office is closed. Those advantages—and the goodwill they engender—go out the window when patients waste a trip only to find your doors locked and the lights out, however. With Thanksgiving next week, make sure you’ve done everything you can to make the public aware of when you will and will not be open. …
Read More
URGENT MESSAGE: Every patient needs vaccinations at one point or another. Yet, some urgent care operators shy away from immunization campaigns for fear that they’re financially risky or are simply too much of a hassle. However, risk can be greatly diminished—or even eliminated—with proper planning, basic understanding of storage requirements, and ensuring your clinic is offering what the community you serve needs. Jack Roberts is an expert marketer who specializes in promoting and growing physician …
Read MoreIn 2015, Merchant Medicine (Shoreview, Minnesota) released data from a detailed national study conducted in 2014 regarding U.S. patients’ preferences regarding retail clinics versus urgent care clinics versus primary-care physicians’ offices. The survey involved more than 2,000 adults between the ages of 18 and 54 years and was conducted by Sparks Research and Merchant Medicine on behalf of DXM Marketing Group. Survey data showed that the reasons patients chose a specific type of health-care setting …
Read More
Denver Health is ready to join the ranks of health systems that are diversifying its service offerings to include urgent care—and will do so in a big way, but without Arthur Gonzalez. Chief executive officer since 2012, Gonzalez resigned just a week before the opening of a $27 million, 4,500-square-foot clinic that will house an urgent care center, along with primary care and specialty services. The new complex will sit in an underserved section of …
Read MoreU.S. HealthWorks is on a Rocky Mountain high after buying Colorado-based Arbor Occupational Medicine. Bringing Arbor’s four locations into the fold means U.S. Healthworks will now have 231 locations in 21 states; these are the first in Colorado, however. Arbor was founded in Boulder in 1992 with a focus on occupational medicine and physical therapy and a mission to reduce return-to-work time. All told, U.S. HealthWorks collectively has roughly 800 providers who administer care for …
Read More
Urgent message: ZoomCare, which operates 28 walk-in clinics in the Pacific Northwest, has long been a technological innovator, launching web registration, scheduling, and telemedicine in its markets. In the past year, ZoomCare has evolved further to create ZOOM+, integrating urgent care with insurance, primary care, wellness, specialists, and ancillary services. As ZOOM+ redefines the future of urgent care around the needs of its community, there is much that other urgent care operators can learn in attaining revenue growth from a maturing …
Read More
The past five years have been another good stretch for the urgent care marketplace: new data from Accenture, a management consulting firm, show that visits to urgent care clinics increased 19 percent from 2010 to 2015 (projected)—equating to 176.8 million visits this year alone. By comparison, the retail clinic sector (which offers a more limited menu of services than the typical urgent care center) is also growing, expecting to receive 18.8 million patient visits this …
Read More