Urgent Care Centers: How Software Can Increase Profits

What is an Urgent Care Center?

Urgent care centers provide on-demand ambulatory health care to 90 million Americans every year. These clinics fill the gap between the physician’s office and the emergency room by offering a variety of medical services, such as treating fractures and wounds, running diagnostic tests, and treating illnesses. Urgent care centers also offer primary care and family medicine services to meet the needs of the growing number of consumers seeking convenient and affordable healthcare options. 

About 9,000 urgent care centers exist in the U.S and that number is on the rise making urgent care centers an increasingly important part of the U.S. healthcare system. 

What Challenges do Urgent Care Centers Face?

Despite their growing importance, urgent care management faces numerous challenges to long-term profitability. Rising healthcare costs, staffing shortages, increased competition from large health systems, declining reimbursements, and continued COVID-19 stressors are just a few factors that make it difficult for urgent care operators to build the long term value of their business. These factors also negatively impact urgent care patients.

To remain profitable and competitive, urgent care centers need to manage high labor and overhead costs while increasing revenue. This can be accomplished by increasing daily patient volumes and improving staff productivity. 

How Can Urgent Care Centers Increase Patient Volumes and Productivity?

When we talk about increasing patient volumes, we are not suggesting that urgent care centers should wish for more emergencies! Rather, a crucial component of increasing daily patient volume is improving patient turnaround times. With faster turnaround times, more patients can be treated per hour– an important metric for urgent care management. 

The productivity and service levels of the urgent care staff are essential to a successful patient volume strategy. To treat more patients without increasing staff costs and stress, while also maintaining service quality and quick turnaround times, staff members must have resources which enable them to do their job quickly and efficiently. Urgent care software solutions such as urgent care EHR software are one resource that enable clinical staff to treat more patients while maintaining quality of care and morale.

Faster, quality service will keep patients satisfied. Satisfied patients are more likely to return to the urgent care facility in the future and recommend it to their friends, which increases revenue.

What is Urgent Care EHR / EMR Software?

EHR (or EMR) software is designed to minimize manual tasks for clinical staff and improve the overall quality of care before, during, and after a patient’s visit. EHR and EMR softwares optimize the heavy and numerous workflows involved in urgent care management and store digitized versions of patient medical records.This type of urgent care software is designed to streamline communication and access to patient information and allows for easy sharing of patient information among providers. 

By helping urgent care center staff members operate more efficiently, EHR and EMR software enables urgent care clinics to process patients more quickly. The software also serves to reduce staff and patient frustration by removing time-consuming manual tasks and eliminating human error. In addition, most urgent care EHR software allows the facility to interface with outside labs, radiology centers, and pharmacies, further improving care outcomes.

Providing Lab Testing at Urgent Care Centers

The availability of laboratory testing services differentiates urgent care centers as a first point of care from other on-demand retail health clinics. Therefore, another way to attract more patients, improve patient satisfaction, and shorten treatment time is by offering instantaneous, accurate lab results that can be easily shared with patients and external providers. 

Relaymed allows urgent care centers to do this. Relaymed is a simple to implement middleware solution that automatically transfers lab and diagnostic test results from point of care testing devices immediately to the urgent care EHR system. The software is interoperable with over 20 compatible EHR systems and serves to further streamline clinical workflows. 

Relaymed can improve urgent care management by eliminating time-consuming manual lab result entry work, paperwork delays, and healthcare record data errors. It is an affordable SaaS solution that is billed monthly, installs in less than a day, and which requires no additional server or technical resources.  

With lab results going straight into the EHR, valuable urgent care staff time is freed up to serve more patients quickly. Urgent care physicians can diagnose and treat patients faster by accessing lab results faster and improve care by sharing accurate results with patients and their external providers instantaneously. The result is increased patient throughput, better quality treatment, and increased patient satisfaction.

In short, Relaymed a simple fix that can go a long way to increasing your urgent care center profitability!

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We’re currently helping dozens of urgent care centers record their patients’ test results securely and automatically in their urgent care software systems. Let us give you a peek at how Relaymed can help improve your clinic’s efficiency while reducing your costs and patient wait times. Sign up for a quick 15 minute demo!
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Learn more about how we have helped urgent care centers.
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