How to Start an Urgent Care Center
Posted: Monday, July 10, 2006
by David Stern MD CPC
Practice Velocity
Urgent care centers are expanding rapidly throughout the USA. This rapid growth of the urgent care industry has been fueled by public demand for convenient and timely access to medical care. As opposed to hospital emergency rooms, urgent care centers are generally not located in hospitals, and urgent care centers are designed to care for illnesses and injuries that need timely treatment but are not true emergencies. A good place to learn more about the industry is through the Journal of Urgent Care Medicine, which is published monthly and offers free subscriptions to urgent care physicians.
The following list of suggestions for starting an urgent care center are not meant to be complete; but if you are considering starting an urgent care center, these ideas will give you a start.
- Decide on Your Model: Are you going to be a simple physician-owned medical practice? Is a joint venture urgent care with a hospital a good idea? Does one of the new urgent care franchising models make sense? Is there a successful local urgent care chain, with which you could join forces? If your center will be owned by non-physicians, then you need a lawyer with specific expertise in setting up a medical practice with non-physician owners in your state. Many lawyers have set up medical practices with physicians or hospitals, but the legalities in many states are very different (and quite rarely known by lawyers, even lawyers with healthcare expertise) for owners that are not physicians or hospitals.
- Write a Business Plan: Anyone thinking about starting an urgent care center should spend the time to sit down and write a business plan. The discipline of thinking through the many issues involved in starting an urgent care.
- Find the Ideal Urgent Care Community: The ideal city for a new urgent care center has at least 40,000 people in the area and does not have any other urgent care centers in the community.If you choose a community that already has adequate urgent care access, an inadequate insured population or an overabundance of primary care physicians (which is quite rare)--then your chances of success will diminish.
- Choose an Urgent Care Location: Choosing an adequate community is important, but you will also need to find the correct street address for your urgent care center. A freestanding building on a busy thoroughfare is ideal but not necessary for success. Finding the ideal location may be difficult. An excellent startup consultant should be able to direct you to a realtor with national expertise (such as National UC Realty) in helping you find the best location for an urgent care center.
- Market Your Urgent Care: You will need to determine the most cost-effective method to make the community aware of the services available in the starting of your urgent care center. Various urgent care centers have found effective multiple different methods, including billboards, grand openings, newspaper advertisements, radio spots, drive-through flu shot clinics, newsletters, and many other original ideas. Be careful that you do not overspend on advertising, as many centers underestimate the amount of capital that will be needed to operate the urgent care center for the full year.
- Select Services to Offer: A few urgent care centers focus only on serving walk-in patients from the community at large. Other urgent care centers choose to combine primary care medicine and walk-in services in the same facility. A common model for urgent care centers incorporates occupational medicine services in addition to walk-in services. Local corporations are often delighted to have local clinic that will serve their needs for treatment of workers compensation cases, post-offer physical examinations, drug screening, executive physical examinations, and provide other corporate medicine services.
- Find a Billing Company: Urgent care billing is unique. You will want to find a biller with specific knowledge in the intricacies of urgent care coding and billing. Urgent care centers started by hospitals often use hospital billers with no expertise or interest in urgent care billing and coding. Other urgent care physician entrepreneurs choose to use an inexperienced spouse or receptionist to bill claims. Either error will lead to serious financial difficulties, as inefficient billing and collections of revenues will strangle the financial lifeblood out of a startup urgent care center.
- Initiate Contracting and Credentialing: Startup urgent care centers are often amazed to find that so many patients call and ask if the clinic "takes" their insurance. What they are really asking in most cases is whether the urgent care center is contracted with a particular insurance company. Patients pay a significant portion of their paycheck for their health insurance, and they expect to be able to use that insurance at their urgent care center. It is rare for a center to start this soon enough, as the full process can take six months or more. You will want to use a contracting professional with specific expertise and vast experience in urgent care contracting and credentialing. It is critical to have the contracts expeditiously initiated and completed and to secure the best possible rates available in your community.
- Select EMR Software: It is critical to find software that will make your urgent care center operations more efficient and successful. Most software solutions are designed for must slower-paced practices than urgent care centers. In addition, most EMR solutions do not have significant functionalities for occupational medicine. The wrong software choice can significantly slow down the clinical throughput and seriously degrade your revenue cycle management.
- Network with Experts in Starting Urgent Care Centers: Anyone starting out in a new field does well to spend time learning from others who have already found success in the field. The Urgent Care Association of America has two annual conferences with two-day tracks, covering many practical issues in starting an urgent care center. If you have friends that have started an urgent care center, talking with them makes perfect sense. In addition, working with urgent care startup consultants such as Patrice Pash at NMN Consultants is a good way to help ensure your success in the urgent care business. A consultant that has worked with 50-100 urgent care startups is likely to help you avoid many of the pitfalls inherent in starting an urgent care center. Their headquarters are located near Chicago, and they offer free, full-day consultation tours of their affiliated 18 urgent center operations (Physicians Immediate Care). Over 700 people have toured the centers in the past several years.
- Work Hard: If you are willing to pay the price of working extremely long hours and working harder than you ever imagined to reach success, then you might be a good person to consider starting an urgent care.
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Top-level comments on this article: (6 total)We recently started an urgent care center. One point that we would emphasize is signage. It took us until three months after we opened to secure a permit from the city for our sign. Our advice would be two-fold 1) get sign permits early on and 2) don't ignore what they tell you at the UCAOA Urgent Care Startup Conference.Great point! The two most critical points in choosing a locations are: 1) get on a busy street and 2) get great signage. Someone at the Fall UCAOA conference mentioned that they moved a struggling two-year-old urgent care two blocks away onto a busy street last May. Since then, the growth of the urgent care center has been explosive.
We just got back from the Urgent Care Association of America Fall Mini-Conference in Phoenix. It was a fantastic seminar, full of necessary information to start an urgent care center. Dr. Stern (article author), Dr. Shufeldt, Patrice Pash and Kevin Ralofsky were some of the speakers in the startup track. I am looking forward to the full-day session on starting an urgent care center prior to the National Urgent Care Convention of UCAOA in Daytona Beach, May 9-12, 2007. See you there.Thanks Becky. It really was a great conference. The attendees were so excited and attentive. Great healthcare professionals, such as these, that will help UCAOA to accomplish its mission to improve urgent care delivery in America. The 125 attendees came from all Oregon, Florida, California, New England and everywhere in between. Their energy and enthusiasm was genuinely infectious.
I have worked in an Urgent Care Center for over 13 years now. Many differences of opinions on how we should evolve some of our processes. Can anyone help? Any NATIONAL guidelines that folks follow? Thanks. (Please do not include email address)Sure... There are many resources available. You may visit the website of the Urgent Care Associaton of America for more information. In addition, over 500 urgent care professionals have taken advantage of our invitation to come visit the headquarters of Physicians Immediate Care (operates 12 centers), located one hour west of Chicago O'Hare Airport. We would be delighted to host your tour.
Mr Stern,Great advice. Looking forward to getting started, thanks for your help.
Hi, I'm an entrepreneurial and a non-physician. I want to know If I would be able to open a walk in clinic if I wasn't a physician. What would I need to do so in Canada ???
Hi, I am from Africa (congo) and I am not a physician but to know a clinic is a idea I have. I would like to know as a non physician what do I need to have to get into the business.
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