Becker's Hospital Review

36 Executive Briefing Urgent care is fundamentally a retail health service. To meet consumers' demands for quality, service and convenience, a health system's urgent care model must be more like Starbucks than the post office. Starting with site selection in high-traffic retail settings, the urgent care division must rethink the provision of primary care from consumers' point of view. Front-desk personnel should be thought of as clinical concierge rather than receptionists. Facility design should focus on rapid patient flow. Supplies and medications should focus on the top 30-40 requirements rather than all or none. Follow up and downstream coordination should be a core focus as the clinical diagnosis is completed. Done correctly, the consumers will be highly satisfied and captured by the health system. 5. Move quickly. The market is rapidly moving. Who do you want to control this growing front door to your health system: you or a venture capital firm? Payers are also interested as a means to provide immediate primary care access without having to incur the expense of an ER visit. Moreover, the urgent care market is highly fragmented, offering market space for health systems (or nontraditional competitors) to capture and influence how urgent care develops. Unless this is an organizational priority and your health system is moving rapidly, you are going to be outmaneuvered by competitors who are not constrained by your historical models of primary care. The next wave of urgent care growth is just emerging. Health systems that want to influence the growing number of patients using this primary care channel must understand patient needs not being met today, know how new healthcare models are meeting those needs, create new retail-focused capabilities, and design integrated urgent care models around consumers' demands. Those providers able to accomplish this feat will ride the growing wave and influence their population's healthcare decisions at the first healthcare touch points. Kate Lovrien is the Vice President of Strategy and Luke C. Peterson is the Vice President of Innovation at Urgent Care Partners. They can be contacted at Kate.Lovrien@UrgentCarePartners.com or Luke.Peterson@UrgentCarePartners.com. For more information contact UCP at 877.776.3639 or www.UrgentCarePartners.com. n 10 Things to Know About Urgent Care in 2017 • Urgent care is a rapidly growing segment of the healthcare industry. It is projected to grow by 30 to 40 percent over the next five years. • By the end of 2017, approximately 130 million urgent care visits will occur per year in nearly 8,000 urgent care centers. • In high-density markets with the payer mix and demographics to viably support a typical urgent care model, demand outpaces supply by 22 percent. • Urgent care is generally a financially viable primary care model in markets where 12,000 or more visits can be captured with 60 percent or better underlying private insurance status. • Numerous opportunities exist to expand urgent care in nearly every U.S. metro area today. • The urgent care industry is highly fragmented, with the top 10 operators only accounting for 17 percent of total urgent care centers. • Driven by increasing healthcare consumers' demands for convenience, urgent care is more similar to retail operations than hospital or clinic operations. As such, health system- operated urgent care centers have been challenged to yield a profit. • Typical private urgent care sites have 20 percent or better profit margin compared to hospital-operated sites. • Selected health systems have bet big on urgent care, including: Dignity Health in San Francisco; HCA Healthcare in Nashville, Tenn.; MultiCare Health System in Tacoma, Wash.; Adventist Health System in Altamonte Springs, Fla.; Intermountain in Salt Lake City; and Carolinas HealthCare System in Chapel Hill, N.C. • Other health systems are giving up control of this primary care channel and the patient touch points by outsourcing urgent care to for-profit operators. Urgent Care Partners (UCP) provides strategy, design, activation and operational expertise to rapidly build and acquire health system owned urgent care centers. We are passionate about partnering with health sys- tems to build their internal capabilities while we create consumer-focused, retail delivery urgent care plat- forms and accelerate the health system's transformation to a more patient focused organization.

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