How Urgent Care Clinics Save You Time and Money on Medical Treatment

You’re never really prepared for an illness or injury, and they can happen at any place, at any time, and not necessarily during your doctor’s office hours. If you find yourself in this position, consider urgent care. It can save you both time and money on medical treatment while tending to your needs.

At Rapid Response Urgent Care in Granada Hills, California, our expert team of doctors and nurses provide walk-in coverage and comprehensive urgent care when you don’t have a life-threatening emergency but time is of the essence. Many health insurance plans cover these visits, and the copay is usually much less than what you'd expect for an emergency department (ED) visit.

Urgent care clinics 101

When your need is urgent, but it’s not an emergency, urgent care centers are convenient and generally cost less. You can get care for things like fevers, strep throat, minor cuts, and sprains or strains, and your wait time to get care may be shorter than the emergency department.

Urgent care centers could substantially improve health care access and reduce costs when compared to going to an ED. Care in these stand-alone facilities is 10 times less expensive than the ED, and previous research found that some 36 million ED visits were more appropriate for urgent care centers.

What the data shows

A study published July 2021 in the journal HSR (the journal of Academy Health) looked at daily operating times of urgent care centers to determine how demands on the emergency department change when the facilities are open or when they’re closed.

The study drew from data on almost all urgent care centers in the US and data from the largest collection of all-payer ED visits, including 8.5 million visits made across six states from 2012-2013.

The team, located at Northwestern University, found that urgent care centers reduce ED visits, especially in areas with long ED wait times, as well as among Medicaid enrollees and the uninsured.

Reducing costs

Across the six states, researchers found that the presence of an urgent care center in a ZIP code reduced the number of ED visits in that ZIP code by about 17%. Multiplying the difference in costs between the two settings, the authors calculate that urgent care centers save about $3.3 billion annually in healthcare costs.

The researchers added, though, that this number doesn’t consider other ways urgent care centers might offset those savings. For example, they may encourage new healthcare use or act as a substitute for lower-cost primary care clinics.

Additional benefits

When the researchers looked at the results from the EDs with the longest wait times, they found that urgent care centers reduced the number of visits by nearly 80%. This finding has implications beyond cost reduction, as shifting less urgent cases away from crowded EDs may relieve such adverse outcomes as increased mortality, length of hospital stay, and medication errors.

According to the researchers, the largest impacts of urgent care centers occurred among Medicaid enrollees and the uninsured, which is noteworthy because these two groups use the ED for non-urgent conditions at higher rates, often because they have insufficient access to other care settings.

They concluded that urgent care centers provide opportunities to both reduce healthcare costs and offer additional care access.

The bottom line

The study reinforced that, for moderate-to-serious illness or injury that isn’t life-threatening, urgent care is the right way to go. It can treat:

• Ear or eye pain
• Sore throat
• Cough
• Cold, flu, or COVID-19
• Rash without fever
• Painful urination
• Sprain or strain
• Vomiting, stomach cramping, diarrhea
• Fever without a rash
• Wheezing
• Minor cut that may need stitches

The care you receive may come from a doctor, physician assistant, or nurse practitioner, all of whom are qualified to treat you.

Rapid Response Urgent Care is open seven days a week to be there for you whenever you have an urgent medical condition. Walk in, call us at 818-923-5216, or book an appointment online.