Immediate Care

Urgent care is a category of walk-in clinic focused on the delivery of ambulatory care in a dedicated medical facility outside of a traditional emergency room. Urgent care centers primarily treat injuries or illnesses requiring immediate care, but not serious enough to require an ER visit. Urgent care centers are distinguished from similar ambulatory healthcare centers such as emergency departments and convenient care clinics by their scope of conditions treated and available facilities on-site.

The United States is seeing a rapid increase in the number of urgent care centres. In Europe and the United Kingdom, a very similar service is referred to as a walk-in clinic. While urgent care centers are usually not open 24-hours a day, 70% of centers in the United States open by 8:00 am or earlier and 95% close after 7:00 pm.

The initial urgent care centers opened in the United States during the 1970s. Since then, this healthcare sector has rapidly expanded to approximately 10,000 centers across the United States. Many centers were started by emergency medicine physicians, responding to a public need for convenient access to unscheduled medical care. A significant factor for the increase of these centers is significant monetary savings when compared to ERs. Many managed care organizations (MCOs) now encourage or even require customers to utilize urgent care options. As of 2014, the urgent care industry is worth an estimated $14.5 Billion.

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