Data from the 2014 Urgent Care Chart Survey of 1,778,075 blinded visits by patients to more than 800 different urgent care clinics, conducted by the Journal of Urgent Care Medicine, reveal that the top 3 procedures performed at U.S. urgent care centers in 2014 were as follows, in descending order:
• Medication administration (vaccine, IV, steroid injection, anesthesia)—59.7 million procedures (39.8% of visits)
• Rapid diagnostic tests and cultures—44 million procedures (29.4% of visits)
• Imaging (including radiographs, computed tomography scans and magnetic resonance images, electrocardiographs, and ultrasound images)—23.4 million procedures (15.6% of visits)
The survey’s methodology and data abstraction forms were initially designed in 2008 by researcher Robin M. Weinick, PhD, then an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and a senior scientist at the Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital, and now associate director of RAND Health.
