DDx — URGENT CARE
Urgent Care: the five ways this presents
Each presentation below lists what could be causing it, ranked, with the finding that tells the causes apart and what resolution actually looks like. 25 causes, 25 tests, each cited to a primary source for this specialty rather than borrowed from another one.
Nothing on these pages describes a client or an engagement.
PRESENTATIONS
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Patient acquisition cost is climbing
Marketing spend divided by visits keeps rising. Nobody can say whether that is the market, the season, the agency or the payer mix, because the number moves for four different reasons at once. And there is no industry figure to compare against: no association,…
5 CAUSES · 5 TESTS
WORK IT THROUGH → -
New patient volume is short of plan
There is real demand in the trade area. Respiratory season proves it. But the shoulder months are thin, the midday and early-morning hours are dead, and the large employers nearby — distribution, construction, trucking, manufacturing — send almost nothing here…
5 CAUSES · 5 TESTS
WORK IT THROUGH → -
Growth has plateaued
Visits per clinic per day haven't moved in three or four seasons. Respiratory season still delivers, but the shoulder months are thinner than they used to be, and two more urgent cares opened inside the trade area since the last time anyone looked. Spend is fl…
5 CAUSES · 5 TESTS
WORK IT THROUGH → -
Performance varies by location
The playbook is identical across the network. The results are not. One center is consistently busy and another two miles of demographics away never gets there. Reimbursement per visit differs too, and nobody can say how much of the gap is the market, how much …
5 CAUSES · 5 TESTS
WORK IT THROUGH → -
Preparing for sale
There is a process coming in twelve to twenty-four months. The volume chart looks good, but most of the slope is Q4, the same-store number came from a spreadsheet nobody can rebuild, and the buyer's team is going to ask where the visits came from. Nobody wants…
5 CAUSES · 5 TESTS
WORK IT THROUGH →
WHICH ONE
How to tell which one you have
These five overlap, and two or three usually apply at once. The order to read them in is set by which number actually moved. If cost per new patient moved, start there. If demand held and bookings did not, start with the volume page. If nothing moved at all, start with the plateau page — and if the group total looks acceptable while one site keeps coming up in conversation, read the variance page first, because a pooled number is structurally incapable of showing you what you are looking for.
Every cause on every page above carries a measurement you can run in your own systems, with the finding that confirms it and the finding that rules it out. Run two or three before you brief anybody. If the tests tell you this is not a marketing problem, that is the correct answer and it cost you nothing.
RESOLUTION
What resolves each, and what resolved looks like
Each presentation resolves to a different part of the work, and the pages say which: reporting and attribution where the finding is a measurement error, conversion and desk work where the loss is between the inquiry and the admission, acquisition where the demand genuinely is not there, and pre-sale work where the question is whether growth can be re-run by somebody else.
Each also carries what resolved looks like as a number — the measure, the published median, the top decile where an honest one exists, and a target range — with the source in the row. Where no credible distribution is published, the page says so instead of borrowing one from an adjacent specialty. That absence is itself a finding: it means your own trailing history is the only benchmark worth measuring against.
WHERE YOU STAND
Reference ranges for urgent care networks
See also where you stand and what decides the outcome before any of this is treated.
A differential narrows the list. It does not close it — that is what the examination is for.
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