Race Is On to Profit From Rise of Urgent Care

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Race Is On to Profit From Rise of Urgent Care

Business Day
By Julie Creswell July 9, 2014

....
For more than eight hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, an assortment of ailments is on display at the tidy medical clinic on Main Avenue here. But all of the patients have one thing in common: No one is being treated at a traditional doctor’s office or emergency room.

Instead, they have turned to one of the fastest-growing segments of American health care: urgent care, a common category of walk-in clinics with uncommon interest from Wall Street. Once derided as “Doc in a Box” medicine, urgent care has mushroomed into an estimated $14.5 billion business, as investors try to profit from the shifting landscape in health care.
....

But what is happening here is also playing out across the nation, as private equity investment firms, sensing opportunity, invest billions in urgent care and related businesses. Since 2008, these investors have sunk $2.3 billion into urgent care clinics. Commercial insurance companies, regional health systems and local hospitals are also looking to buy urgent care practices* or form business relationships with them.

The business model is simple: Treat many patients as quickly as possible. Urgent care is a low-margin, high-volume proposition. At PhysicianOne here, most people are in and out in about 30 minutes. The national average charge runs about $155 per patient visit. Do 30 or 35 exams a day, and the money starts to add up.

* So they can add a facility fee to the original charge?

Hospitals face increased scrutiny for charging facility fees

[Warpy]

1. All the urgent care places here have been closed

because the emergency rooms are so much more profitable.

[magical thyme]

2. we turned our sister hospital into an urgent care center last fall

It wasn't about new ways to make a profit. It was about continuing to serve outlying areas without going under. It's open 12 hours/day and lacks ambulance service, but offers somewhat more capability than a typical doctors office or clinic, plus we provide mutual backup if chemistry or hematology analyzers go down.

We have heavy tourism in late spring through mid fall, so a lot of patients from all over the world for whom we have no medical history. And whereas doctors offices tend to close for an hour at lunch, we're open straight through.

It remains to be seen if the business model will be viable, though. It lost a lot of patients after the change.

[antigop]

3. thanks...these places are popping up all over. nt