D-02 — NEW PATIENT VOLUME · URGENT CARE

New patient volume is short of plan — urgent care

The lobby fills and empties — and the employer book is close to zero

PRESENTATION — WHAT THE OPERATOR SEES

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. What occupational medicine does arrive walked in on its own. Nobody has called on an HR or safety manager in a year.

DIFFERENTIAL — LIKELY CAUSES, MOST LIKELY FIRST

01
There is no B2B sales infrastructure for the employer line

Occupational medicine is a contracted business-to-business service bolted onto a walk-in clinic. It is won by named-account selling to HR and safety managers, not by consumer advertising. Centers without that motion get incidental occ-med volume only, which is why the employer book stays close to zero in networks that have otherwise done everything right.

The top 20% of clinics drive 29% of their total volume through employer-paid services and workers'-comp payers, averaging 12 occupational-medicine visits per day. The bottom 20% average fewer than 1 visit per day from those payer types. 80% of total occ-med volume consolidates into a concentrated minority of enterprise networks — the industry's own analyst attributes this to "the infrastructure required to secure employer contracts," leaving occ med "merely an incidental revenue stream" for smaller practices.

Experity / Urgent Care Consultants analysis via JUCM Developing Data, "The Structural Divide in Urgent Care Occupational Medicine" (Ayers), 29 May 2026. Sample size not disclosed in the article

NOT THIS IF — You already hold signed employer accounts producing steady weekday volume and the thinness is confined to consumer walk-in in the shoulder months.
02
You offer occupational medicine but you do not sell it

Capability is near-universal in this vertical; volume is not. The gap between offering a service and holding contracts for it is the whole story.

83.1% of centers said they offered occupational medicine services in 2019 and roughly 79% in 2022. Among centers offering it, the Level III exam menu is nearly complete: fitness for duty 98.1%, post-accident 96.2%, DOT and commercial driver 89.7%, fire fighters 76.1%, police 74.7%. 54% say they provide consulting services to their employer clients — risk evaluation, hazard mitigation, customised back-to-work programmes. Yet median occ-med volume is 5 visits/day and workers' comp 4.

UCA 2022 Operations Benchmarking Report, pp.22–26 (n=1,100 / 725 / 568) and p.9 (n=775); UCA 2019 Benchmarking Report, read at source

NOT THIS IF — You genuinely do not perform DOT physicals, drug screens, post-accident or fitness-for-duty exams. Then this is a capability build first, not a pipeline problem.
03
Walk-in demand arrives and leaves — the lobby is the leak

Urgent care is walk-in led. The conversion event is not a booking, it is whether the person who walked through the door stayed long enough to be seen. Wait is the abandonment mechanism.

Average scheduled visit wait time is 19 minutes; average walk-in wait time is 36 minutes. National average visit duration is 59.6 minutes, with 42% of patients out in under 45 minutes and 62% within an hour. Across 3.1 million Google reviews at 3,665 centers, wait times appear in 49.5% of negative reviews versus 41.1% of positive.

Solv, 13.5 million platform visits, via UCA Spring 2021 Benchmarking Report p.23; Experity EMR ~33M records 2024 via JUCM (Ayers), 27 Feb 2025; Urgent Care Consultants review analysis via JUCM Developing Data, 30 Jun 2026. Note: no association, vendor or claims aggregator publishes an LWBS distribution for urgent care — you must measure your own

NOT THIS IF — Your door-to-door is under 45 minutes at peak hour and your own walkout count is negligible. Then arrivals are not being lost in the lobby.
04
Intake happens in the lobby, so the record of who arrived and left does not exist

You cannot manage a pipeline you do not capture. When registration begins at the desk rather than before arrival, there is no timestamped record of the people who queued and gave up.

Only 17% of centers have patients complete online paperwork prior to the visit; 42% complete registration with staff and 41% on a tablet onsite — 83% of intake happens in the lobby. 56.7% of centers allow scheduling for a specific time and 65.8% offer reservations or place-in-line, so the overlay exists at roughly two-thirds of centers but the data capture does not follow it.

UCA 2022 Operations Benchmarking Report, p.21 (n=1,055) and p.10 (n=1,062), read at source

NOT THIS IF — You already timestamp arrival, room time and disposition for every person who enters, including those who leave before being seen.
05
The trough hours are empty and nothing is booked into them

Walk-in arrivals are concentrated. The capacity that sits idle midday and early morning is exactly the capacity occupational medicine is designed to fill, because employer exams are scheduled rather than spontaneous.

Less than 0.4% of urgent care visits arrive before 7:00AM or after 9:00PM. Roughly 20% of centers are closed on Saturdays and 30% on Sundays, per a February 2025 analysis of 14,301 centers. UCA notes directly that centers offering occupational medicine "are able to schedule these patients at times of the day when walk-in traffic is slower."

Experity EMR via JUCM Developing Data, "Patient Arrival Times In Urgent Care," 1 Jul 2024; National Urgent Care Realty and Urgent Care Consultants via JUCM Developing Data, 28 Mar 2025; UCA 2022 Operations Benchmarking Report, p.23

NOT THIS IF — Your intraday arrival curve is already flat and your weekday midday utilisation matches your evening peak.

HOW TO TELL THEM APART

How to tell these apart in your own numbers

Each of these is a measurement you can run yourself, without us.

01 · There is no B2B sales infrastructure for the employer line

Count two things for a full quarter: your own occupational-medicine plus workers'-comp visits per clinic per day, and the number of named employer accounts called on per month by a person whose job that is. Then compute employer-paid plus WC as a share of total volume.

CONFIRMS IF

Occ-med plus WC runs under 2 visits/day, employer-paid volume is under 10% of total, and no one owns an account list. That is the bottom-quintile profile the data describes.

EXCLUDES IF

You are at or near the median of 9/day combined (5 occ med + 4 workers' comp) with named accounts under contract. The pipeline problem is elsewhere.

02 · You offer occupational medicine but you do not sell it

List the occ-med services you actually performed in the last 90 days — DOT physicals, drug screens, post-accident, fitness for duty, return-to-work — with volume against each. Compare against the services on your website and in your listings; most centers do not have an employer-facing services page at all, so the comparison is short.

CONFIRMS IF

The offered menu is broad and the performed volume is concentrated in one or two walk-in-driven services, typically drug screens.

EXCLUDES IF

Performed volume tracks the offered menu across categories. You are selling; the constraint is capacity or market size.

03 · Walk-in demand arrives and leaves — the lobby is the leak

For two full weeks log arrival time, room time and discharge time for every visit, and separately count every person who registered or queued and left before being seen. Build your own LWBS rate — no published urgent care benchmark exists, so this figure only ever comes from your own floor.

CONFIRMS IF

Peak-hour door-to-door runs materially above the 59.6-minute national mean, walk-in wait sits far above the 36-minute reference, and the walkout count is non-trivial.

EXCLUDES IF

Door-to-door holds under 45 minutes through peak and walkouts are near zero. Demand is not arriving and being lost.

04 · Intake happens in the lobby, so the record of who arrived and left does not exist

What percentage of registrations begin before the patient arrives? And can you produce, from the record, a list of everyone who was in the building yesterday and was not seen?

CONFIRMS IF

Pre-arrival registration is at or below the 17% industry figure, and the second list cannot be produced at all.

EXCLUDES IF

Pre-arrival registration is materially above 17% and disposition is captured for every arrival.

05 · The trough hours are empty and nothing is booked into them

Plot arrivals in 30-minute blocks across a full week. Count the blocks running below two arrivals and multiply by staffed provider-hours to get the idle capacity in visit-equivalents.

CONFIRMS IF

There is a sustained weekday midday or early-morning trough of several provider-hours with no scheduled occ-med work booked into it.

EXCLUDES IF

The curve is flat, or the troughs are already filled with scheduled employer exams.

WHAT RESOLVES EACH

What resolves this, and how you will know it resolved

There is no B2B sales infrastructure for the employer line	Rx 01 · patient acquisition →	This is the highest-leverage gap in the vertical and it is a sales-infrastructure build, not a media buy: a named-account list built from the trade area's employer census, HR and safety-manager contacts, a contracted rate and turnaround sheet, and a scheduled call cadence. State it frankly — consumer advertising does not sell an employer contract, and any agency that proposes a media budget against this cause has misread it.
You offer occupational medicine but you do not sell it	Rx 02 · medical practice websites →	An employer-facing services page with the actual exam menu, turnaround commitments and the consulting services 54% of centers say they provide but few document. This is the artefact a safety manager forwards internally. It is cheap and most centers do not have it.
Walk-in demand arrives and leaves — the lobby is the leak	Rx 03 · patient conversion →	Place-in-line and same-day capacity matching close the 36-minute walk-in versus 19-minute scheduled wait gap. What does not work: buying more arrivals into a lobby that is already shedding them. That converts spend directly into 1-star reviews.
Intake happens in the lobby, so the record of who arrived and left does not exist	Rx 03 · patient conversion →	Pre-arrival registration and disposition capture. The by-product matters as much as the throughput gain: it produces the first LWBS series your business has ever had, in a vertical where nobody publishes one.
The trough hours are empty and nothing is booked into them	Rx 03 · patient conversion →	Book employer exams into the documented walk-in troughs — the association describes this as the operating advantage of the occ-med line. This is capacity you are already paying for.

WHAT "RESOLVED" LOOKS LIKE — Occupational-medicine plus workers'-compensation visits per clinic per day, and their share of total volume

MEDIAN

9 visits/day combined — 5 occupational medicine plus 4 workers' comp against a median total patient volume of 56/day, or 16.1% of volume (UCA 2022 Operations Benchmarking Report, n=775). This reconciles with the UCA 2018 Benchmark Study's 16.4% of total patient volume, split 8.4% occupational health and 6.2% workers' comp.

TOP DECILE

The published top band is the top quintile: an average of 12 occ-med visits per day and 29% of total volume from employer-paid and workers'-comp payers. The bottom 20% average fewer than 1 per day. No decile is published — we do not extrapolate one.

TARGET

Occ-med plus workers' comp toward 10–12 visits per day and roughly a quarter of total volume. That is the average of the top quintile, not above it, and it is a distribution position rather than a promise. It is also gated by the employer density of your trade area — a catchment with no large employers cannot reach it, and we would say so before quoting.

UCA 2022 Operations Benchmarking Report p.9 (n=775); UCA 2018 Benchmark Study via JUCM, 31 Oct 2019; Experity / Urgent Care Consultants via JUCM Developing Data, 29 May 2026

HOW THIS DIFFERS BY SCALE

How this differs by scale

Single site	One center. The occ-med opportunity is bounded by the employer census inside a 5-mile ring, and one large contract can move the number materially. The lobby leak is measurable by hand in two weeks with a clipboard. Realistically a single center competes for the accounts the enterprise networks have not bothered to sign.
Group	Two to ten centers. This is where a shared named-account function first pays for itself — one salesperson covering a metro's employers across several sites, with a single contracted rate sheet. It is also where site-to-site variance in occ-med volume first becomes diagnostic: same metro, same offer, different volume means the difference is the selling, not the market.
Platform	Multi-metro. The data says 80% of occ-med volume already sits inside enterprise networks, which means at platform scale this is the line you are expected to have and the line diligence will look at hardest. It is also the most defensible: contracted employer revenue is recurring and transferable in a way that walk-in volume is not.