By Bobby Ghoshal, Chief Executive Officer, Experity.
Urgent care has become a regular part of how millions of people interact with healthcare and a cornerstone of the broader on-demand care landscape. At its core, on-demand care gives consumers the ability to initiate and access appropriate healthcare services on their terms: when, where, and how they need them, without unnecessary friction.
New federal data reinforces just how mainstream that access point has become. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 27.6% of Americans visited an urgent care center at least once in 2024. Among adults ages 18 to 64, that figure reached 28.9%.
The encounter may still begin with an immediate need, but patients increasingly arrive with healthcare histories, follow-up needs, and expectations shaped by digital experiences across the rest of their lives. Urgent care leaders have an opportunity to consider how the principles of on-demand care can support more of that journey while preserving the speed, access, and convenience that made the model successful.
A Bigger Role in Healthcare Access
For some patients, urgent care already occupies a larger place in their healthcare lives than the occasional sick visit. In 2024, 8.6% of U.S. adults reported an urgent care center or a clinic in a drug or grocery store as their usual source of healthcare. Among adults ages 18 to 34, the figure was 12.2%. (CDC)
Those numbers should get the industry’s attention. They suggest that the boundaries between traditional categories of healthcare access are becoming less distinct for at least some consumers.
At the same time, urgent care organizations have expanded what they can provide. Depending on the organization and community, patients may encounter urgent care through occupational medicine, diagnostic services, vaccinations and other preventive services, virtual care, or follow-up related to an earlier visit.
The opportunity is substantial, but expansion deserves a clear strategy. Adding services alone does not define the future of urgent care. Leaders need to determine which healthcare needs fit the model, where their organizations can provide meaningful continuity, and how additional services affect clinical and operational complexity.
Preserve What Patients Value About Urgent Care
Growth into a broader access role should begin with the characteristics that made urgent care valuable in the first place. In many ways, urgent care helped establish the expectations that define on-demand care today: patients can initiate care on their terms and access appropriate services without waiting for a traditional appointment.
As urgent care expands, new services should make appropriate care easier to access without introducing significant delays, complicated processes, or administrative burdens that undermine the accessibility the organization is trying to extend.
Urgent care organizations can evaluate new services based on how naturally they fit within their clinical capabilities, staffing model, patient population, community needs, and existing operations. They can also consider what happens after the patient leaves. As the range of services grows, information and follow-up become increasingly important parts of delivering a coherent experience.
The future of urgent care may therefore depend as much on coordinating care across settings as expanding the services available within urgent care.
The Visit Has a Before and an After
An episodic encounter still exists within a larger healthcare journey. A patient may arrive with a medication history that affects treatment. An X-ray may uncover a finding that requires additional evaluation. A test result may require follow-up. The patient may need to return to primary care or move to a higher level of care.
Those transitions have long been a challenge across healthcare. Research specifically examining urgent care transitions has emphasized timely, accurate clinician-to-clinician communication and patient engagement when patients move from urgent care to primary care or the emergency department. (PubMed)
As urgent care takes on a larger role in healthcare access, effective coordination across settings becomes increasingly consequential. The quality of an encounter includes the information available when care begins, the information generated during the visit, and how effectively relevant information follows the patient afterward.
This is an area where health technology can play an important role. Digital access can help patients enter care more easily. Accessible clinical information can give providers greater context at the point of care. Communication tools can support instructions and follow-up. Integrated data can help organizations understand what happened across the entire encounter and identify where additional action is needed.
Technology can support that broader on-demand care experience by reducing friction before the visit, giving providers better information during the encounter, and supporting communication and coordination afterward. Urgent care can become easier to access and better coordinated with the patient’s broader healthcare journey without abandoning the episodic operating model that makes it distinct.
Continuity Does Not Require Owning the Entire Patient Journey
As on-demand care expands, urgent care leaders will need to define where greater continuity fits within the model. Primary care has an established role in prevention, chronic disease management, long-term treatment planning, and the ongoing clinician-patient relationship. Urgent care brings its own strengths to the healthcare system, with an operating model built around timely, convenient access to immediate healthcare needs.
Research on urgent care and primary care has raised this same issue for years, examining how urgent care can improve access while maintaining continuity across settings. Communication and collaboration are recurring themes in that research.
For urgent care leaders, that creates a more useful definition of continuity. The organization does not have to become the destination for every healthcare need. It can help make each encounter a better-coordinated part of the patient’s care.
Sometimes that means providing another appropriate service within the urgent care organization. Sometimes it means ensuring the patient understands what should happen next. Sometimes it means making information available to another clinician or setting.
The goal is to reduce the likelihood that each encounter begins and ends as an information island.
Defining the Next Chapter of Urgent Care
The growth of urgent care has already changed where and how Americans seek healthcare. In doing so, the industry helped establish a model of on-demand care built around access, convenience, and the ability for consumers to seek appropriate care on their terms.
Its next chapter may be about how far those principles can extend. There is room to expand access, add services, use technology to reduce friction, create greater continuity, and improve coordination across a patient’s healthcare journey. The organizations that pursue those opportunities will need to balance them against the qualities patients already value: convenience, speed, accessibility, and confidence that they can get the care they need.
Urgent care does not need to own the entire patient journey to play a larger role in it. Its opportunity is to make appropriate care easier to access when and where patients need it, more informed by what came before, and better coordinated with what comes next.
By Dr. Benjamin Barlow, chief medical officer, Experity.
As we evaluate the healthcare landscape following the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly the urgent care (UC) industry, facilities have undergone significant transformation. Patient behaviors and economic factors have converged to reshape the way people perceive healthcare.
For urgent care, access to the use of reliable, accurate data is critical to inform intelligent decision-making and clinic success throughout dynamic market conditions and changing consumer preferences.
Part of this adaption centers around redefining expectations and benchmarks to measure success by leveraging data-driven insights to ensure that UC clinics continue meeting the evolving needs of their patient population.
Changing Patient Behaviors
In 2019, urgent care clinics were a familiar and reliable part of the healthcare ecosystem. Patients sought their services for minor injuries, illnesses, and a range of non-life-threatening conditions. During the pandemic, patients visited for COVID-related issues like testing, vaccinations, and respiratory care, but were hesitant to visit medical facilities for non-COVID conditions in fear of contracting diseases.
Now, UC clinics are vastly different as patient sentiment has again changed. This transformation can be attributed to shifts in patient behavior and the economic impact of healthcare decisions. Additionally, the end of the public health emergency (PHE) has stripped millions of Americans of their Medicaid coverage, further amplifying the issue of healthcare access, and adding to the uncertainty surrounding patient healthcare coverage.
According to a 2022 Gallup report, 38% of Americans delayed seeking medical care due to cost implications, marking a 12% increase from the previous year. This reflects the growing concerns surrounding healthcare affordability, having a profound impact on when and where patients seek medical attention. Rising deductibles, changes in insurance coverage, and the economic conditions following the pandemic have led individuals to reconsider their healthcare choices, often delaying care until conditions worsen and requiring costly emergency room (ER) visits.
The worsening of these cases is often preventable if patients seek care when they first notice symptoms, and UCs can help fill this gap as an alternative to an ER visit. With robust education through marketing initiatives, the value of a practice and the services it can provide throughout the community will ensure patients have the information needed to make educated decisions about their healthcare.
By Adam Steinberg, EVP client experience, Experity.
The popularity of urgent care has grown continuously over the past several decades, but in just the last few years, the U.S. market has exploded as more and more patients look for nonemergent care options that are more affordable, accessible and convenient.
For many patients, urgent care offers more flexible hours than traditional physician offices and provides care that is both faster and less costly than a visit to the emergency room. The benefits of urgent care were further accentuated by the COVID-19 pandemic, as clinics across the country swiftly adapted to meet the evolving needs of patients and proved that healthcare can be high-velocity, high-quality and accessible to the masses.
Urgent care clinics served a crucial role in providing accessible testing and vaccination for the COVID-19 virus. As a result of urgent care’s impressive response to this demand, its status in the broader healthcare continuum has elevated it to the care site of choice for millions of patients, leading to a significant rise in daily patient visit volumes and expanded expectations for clinics nationwide.
While patient demand and visit volumes continue increasing for U.S. urgent cares, as do staffing shortages. Keeping clinics fully staffed and ensuring staff satisfaction is a top priority for clinic leaders and owners to continue meeting growing patient demand. To better understand the industry’s most pressing growth and retention challenges, and to provide urgent care leaders with actionable insights to support staff satisfaction at their own practices, urgent care leaders across the country were surveyed in the spring of 2022 to reveal beneficial strategies to boost success in these areas and fundamental changes necessary for urgent care clinics to retain and attract talent.
Keeping Staff Satisfied by Meeting Their Top Needs
As demands on clinic staff increase, meeting and prioritizing employee needs is essential for retention. According to the responses from urgent care leaders surveyed about key initiatives they’ve implemented at their own clinics to keep staff happy on the job, the top two initiatives for increasing job satisfaction and retention were offering flexible scheduling and financial incentives.
Clinicians, radiologists, and front desk staff are some of the most difficult positions to fill at clinics right now, all of which are essential to a clinic’s day-to-day operations. Providing the desired incentives for clinic staff will help retain the current workforce and entice new talent to join the team – helping to maintain a fully staffed clinic that delivers on the promise to provide quality, accessible, on-demand care.
Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm focused on growth investing, has merged DocuTAP and Practice Velocity— two major contributors in the on-demand healthcare and urgent care space. The new organization will operate under the brand name Experity.
Dr. David Stern
“We thank all of our clients and partners for the overwhelming enthusiasm and support since announcing our intent to merge,” said Dr. David Stern, CEO, Experity. “Not only is this an exciting time for Experity’s employees, customers and partners, but for the industry as a whole. We’ve all witnessed the evolution of urgent care and growth into nontraditional, on-demand healthcare. This merger is a reflection of industry growth and the need for solutions that can further power the patient-centered healthcare revolution. Patients have more choices than ever before, and the unification of these great brands will further enable current and future clients to deliver an unmatched patient experience.”
David Stern, former Practice Velocity CEO, has been named CEO of Experity. Eric McDonald, former DocuTAP CEO, will remain actively involved in the company’s future direction as a board member and strategic advisor.
“There are no limitations on what these two forward-thinking companies can do together as they continue to drive innovation during this crucial time in healthcare’s evolution,” said Eric McDonald. “I look forward to assisting the transition in my new role and am very enthusiastic about what the future holds for Experity.”
Serving more than 4,000 clinics from coast to coast, Experity will continue to support and invest in all current software platforms and services previously provided by the merging companies. In addition, customers of each company will have access to new services and solutions, such as patient engagement, teleradiology, business intelligence, remote patient registration and contracting/consulting.
“DocuTAP and Practice Velocity’s current customers remain our number one priority,” said Matt Blosl, Experity CRO, former DocuTAP CRO. “Both companies have always focused on providing amazing solutions and customer service — this will not change. In addition, the scale and resources of the combined company will empower us to speed up our pipeline of software production and significantly amplify our impact on the rapidly expanding urgent care industry.”
“These two distinguished companies have driven significant expansion in the on-demand healthcare space having been perennially recognized by Black Book and KLAS for excellence in the field,” said Andrew Park, managing director, Warburg Pincus. “Both organizations have helped urgent care providers carve out their own place in the increasingly diverse ecosystem that is healthcare. We expect to see continued, rapid growth in this area of healthcare, and we are confident that this newly-combined company will play a key role in shaping and defining the future of on-demand healthcare.”
Warburg Pincus led the financing for the transaction. Teleradiology Specialists, Clockwise MD, Urgent Care Consultants, Journal of Urgent Care Medicine and Institute of Urgent Care Medicine are also part of the deal. No other financial details have been disclosed.
Experity will maintain its existing locations and teams in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Atlanta; Machesney Park, Illinois; and Phoenix as the company continues to drive strategic growth across offices.
To learn more about Experity, visit experityhealth.com.
