Categorization of the Models for Urgent Care Delivery: The Need for Standardization

Urgent care centers play an increasingly vital role in the health care landscape as demand for timely and episodic care rises because of primary care shortages and crowded emergency departments (EDs). Urgent care centers serve as a critical bridge between primary and emergency care, but significant variability exists in their scope of practice, staffing, equipment, and available services. This variation leads to corresponding differences in the types of patient illnesses, injuries, acuity, and complexity that an individual urgent care center can appropriately evaluate and treat. Some urgent care centers can manage only very minor illnesses (eg, simple lacerations and uncomplicated pharyngitis), whereas others have staffing and resources (eg, advanced laboratory testing and imaging) necessary to manage more complex illnesses (eg, abdominal pain and minor head trauma in patients taking anticoagulation therapies). Additionally, the training and specialty of urgent care providers varies, including physicians trained in internal medicine, family practice, and emergency medicine, as well as nurse practitioners and physician assistants. Emergency physicians, in particular, are positioned to enhance the ability of urgent care centers to manage a broad spectrum of clinical presentations, reduce unnecessary ED transfers, and improve care quality and efficiency. Despite these important differences in staffing and capabilities, there is a striking lack of research and data about the position and effect of urgent care centers on the health care system in general, as well as the ability to offload crowded EDs in particular. We hypothesize that in order to optimally study the role of urgent care centers in the health care system, there is a need to categorize and study the different types of urgent care centers based on their individual capabilities and the populations that they each serve. To provide a framework for this type of study, this paper proposes a 5-tier model of urgent care capability based on clinical and operational factors, including provider qualifications, diagnostic testing capabilities, hours of operation, and integration with larger health systems. This is a system that differentiates urgent care centers based on capabilities into discrete tiers with a goal to optimize the study of which model will optimally fill the needs of acute, unscheduled care while supporting health system efficiency.