CHAPTER 47
The Future of Urgent Care
John Shufeldt
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THE URGENT CARE INDUSTRY has gone through at least one life cycle and is likely at the tail end of its second life cycle. It may be at the beginning of the third cycle as a result of the coming changes in health-care reimbursement methodology and consolidation in the post–Accountable Care Act (ACA) phase of our health-care system.
In contradistinction to when the industry was at the end of the first life cycle in the late 1980s, urgent care is now an integral component of the care-on-demand provider network that we enjoy in the United States and is thus here to stay, provided the industry continues to adapt to changes, adopts evidence-based quality standards, and remains adept at navigating through turbulent times.
Most agree that the first urgent care centers were started in the mid-1970s by entrepreneurial physicians who saw the need for on-demand care resources for minor injuries and illnesses. These were sometimes called, maybe derisively, docs-in-the-box and were heralded at the time as a stopgap to offload busy emergency departments and compensate for the lack of primary-care providers.