Volume Trends for Urgent Cares and Freestanding EDs
During my IT update presentation at the 2014 PSR Leadership Conference, the following illustration was shown to depict emergency department visits nationally by year (blue line) and urgent care visits nationally by year (red line).
This gives you a quick idea of just how quickly urgent cares have overtaken emergency departments in terms of total volumes seen. This is sucking away a lot of the lower acuity, higher-profit margin patients that emergency departments have seen in the past.
We have seen some national reports, however nothing quantifiable, about urgent cares starting to close their doors. Basically they’ve built out and it looks like they have hit capacity and even gone a little over. We don’t anticipate seeing the rise in urgent care volumes continue to rise in the Northeast of the country. We instead anticipate seeing it start to plateau out a little bit.
We do have data now showing that if you’re a situation involving a freestanding emergency department we can help you model out what start up curves would look like. What kind of volumes to expect and how fast. Below is an example:
Want to learn more about PSR's observations on current healthcare trends? Check out the links below to discover more:
- The Impact of High Deductibles on the Emergency Department
- Optimizing Emergency Deparment Scheduling in Real-Time
