Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/912958
35 Executive Briefing For health systems seeking to grow, the urgent care channel presents a unique opportunity to grow their revenue, influence patients' downstream choices and create a better experience for individuals desiring more convenience and better access. Strategy + Implementation = Success A health system urgent care strategy cannot succeed without successful implementation. Implementing a successful urgent care strategy has historically been difficult for health systems. Too often, the health system attempts to offer urgent care either as same-day schedule availability or by trying to replicate a low- acuity emergency room. Today's modern urgent care models are more like a Starbucks than a physician's office. Here are five tips on how to begin. 1. Understand the consumer-perceived needs. To begin, start by evaluating your market to see if nontraditional providers are offering services patients traditionally receive from your system or if there are concierge or urgent care centers opening. If there are on-demand type providers arising, they are serving an unmet need or working to change the population's expectations. In either case, your health system needs to begin developing an urgent care game plan. 2. Evaluate your system's primary care channels. Primary care today is delivered through five major channels. Any urgent care planning process needs to understand where urgent care fits within the health system's primary care delivery platform. Urgent care is experiencing much faster growth than traditional scheduled physician clinics. Between 2015 and 2020, urgent care is projected to grow 35 percent more than traditional scheduled primary care clinic volumes. Evaluating your health system's primary care channels process starts with a review of when and how patients can access your system. Gaining insight into how it feels to be an individual who wants to access care on their terms is key to redesigning urgent care channels. To do this, health system leaders should ask themselves the following questions: what someone would do if they wanted to see a primary care provider right now, how patients who don't have a primary care provider in their system would get a physician appointment, what does it cost, how much paperwork needs to be filled out, etc. Factoring in this approach with a traditional primary care market plan will start providing both a market and channel viewpoint. 3. Build or engage the right capabilities to develop your urgent care division. Urgent care operations are fundamentally different from other parts of the health system. Urgent care is a highly consumer-focused, low-acuity service that demands the delivery model maintains the highest quality while rapidly serving the patients who arrive in a random pattern. As a result, health systems' track record of providing financially accretive urgent care models is poor. On the other hand, private urgent care companies often make a 20 percent margin. The solution is not to give up urgent care to others, but internally build the right capabilities to participate in this growing trend. Envisioning on-demand primary care delivered through a model with high levels of customer convenience and service is often closer to starting with a blank sheet than incrementally adjusting the current health system primary care models. To pull this off, health systems must give space and time to an urgent care development team that is not constrained by the existing processes and culture. At a minimum, this means hiring leaders who understand retail capabilities and often means bringing in development experts. 4. Design the urgent care model around the consumers' demands not your historical approach.