Urgent care centers have grown rapidly in recent years due to high costs and long wait times at emergency rooms. There were over 8,000 urgent care centers in the U.S. treating an estimated 100 million patients annually. However, urgent care centers still lack coordination through electronic medical records and a unified definition of their services. A connected network of urgent care centers could reduce costs, improve care quality, and help define urgent care standards on a national level.

1. “
Changing the Delivery of Healthcare in America and Abroad”

2. Urgent Care: A New Frontier
Urgent care medicine has been around for more than 15 years but in recent
years, the lacking access to primary care coupled with the exorbitant cost
of hospital emergency services has caused urgent care medicine to
explode. Here are some indicators of how much and why:
• There were 119 million visits to hospital emergency departments in 2005
• 84% of hospital emergency department visits were ambulatory patients
• 34% of hospital emergency department visits were non-emergent
• The average hospital emergency department visit takes 3.3 hours (2005)
• The average cost of a hospital emergency department visit is $1,100
(source)
• The average cost of an urgent care visit is $170
• There are an estimated 8,335 “Urgent Care Centers” in the United States
today
• An estimated 100 million patients are treated in urgent care centers
annually
• Over 300 new urgent care centers open in the USA annually

3. Defining Urgent Care
• The top reasons for patient presentation:
• Cough/Sore Throat/Colds
• Allergy Symptoms/Sinusitus
• Influenza/Vaccines
• Infections
• Migraine/Headache
• Fever
• Lacerations/wounds
• Back Pain/Injuries
• Joint Sprain
• Fractures
• Stomach/Abdominal Pain
• Diarrhea/Vomiting
• Ear Pain/Eye Problems
• Typical Services
• Physician Services
• Extended Hours/Days of Service
• Radiology
• Minor Procedures
• Basic fracture treatment
• I.V. Therapy
• Medication Dispensing

4. The Role of Urgent Care
• Improve access
• Expanded hours
• Expanded schedules
• Efficient walk-in management
• Connected services (Electronic Medical Records)
• Reduce costs & improve services as an alternative to the
hospital emergency departments
• Nearly 80% of hospital ED cases can be treated in urgent care
setting
• Cost of urgent care in lieu of hospital ED is at least 25% of the cost
for same diagnosis and treatment
• Service for true emergencies enhanced with urgent care cases out
of the hospital E.D.

5. The Undeveloped Component
• Connection from center to center
• Expanded use of electronic medical records
• Expansion of patient identification capabilities
• Data accumulation
• Enhanced care management
• Data accumulation for health planning and resource management
• Definitions of services for urgent care
• Clearer & realistic patient expectations
• Clearer and realistic payment structure from payors
• Clear emergence of a leader in the sector
• Definition as an access medical service
• Not a referral center for hospitals
• Not a dumping ground for over-flowing primary care offices

6. Defining of the term “Urgent Care”
• Define access standards
• Hours of service
• Days of service
• Define the services required to qualify for the designation
• Not to be left up to the individual states
• National definitions needed
• Define provider qualifications
• Physicians vs. extenders
• Qualifications of physicians
• Information management requirements
• Require any “urgent care” to have an EMR that connects nationally
• CCHIT Approved products only
• Must link to a common database

7. Why Networking Makes Sense?
• Reduce duplication
• Access to diagnostic results
• Access to past medical & social histories
• Sharing of medication history and regime failures/successes
• Improve care
• Sharing of medical findings/peer assessments
• Use of edits to correct obvious mistakes in documentation
• Use of edits to prevent medication conflicts and errors
• Use of edits to
• Improve healthcare analytics capabilities
• Need for broader metrics to identify better/more timely solutions
• Link retail mentalities of patients with cost indicators
• Reduce medication conflicts
• Aggregated medication histories
• Drug interactivity
• Formulary management
• Speed up the process of access
• No need for re-registrations
• Family and social histories not duplicated
• Clinician’s access to critical medical history

8. The Broader Expectations
• Managed Care Plan Marketing
• Relationships
• Promotion of services offered
• Promotion of cost savings to plans
• Data to answer questions from plans
• Regional Services Marketing
• Focusing on regional players
• UPS
• FedEx
• Banks
• WalMart
• Target
• Directing phone inquiries
• National Medical Report
• Video distribution
• Connection to UCA website
• Recruitment for physicians
http://www.urgentcareamerica.net/About/Video/2669/Content.aspx

9. How we work
Urgent
Care 1
• Individual Centers/Groups maintain their
own financial files
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o
• Patients are in control of the release of
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Care 2
their medical record information via UCA
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Passport™
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c
• Records are an aggregate of all medical
t
Urgent
Care 3 e treatment provided at all affiliated urgent
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care centers
Central Medical
Record Server
D
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•Affiliated centers get comparative data that
Care 4 i
assists them in refining and improving their
r
businesses
e
c
Urgent
• Patients have security and transparency of
t
Care 5
medical information to streamline care
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y
•Central database allows for analytics to
Urgent
better define needs, demands and service
Care 6
requirements