How Far Should Urgent Care Move Beyond Episodic Care?

By Bobby Ghoshal, Chief Executive Officer, Experity.

Urgent care has become a regular part of how millions of people interact with healthcare and a cornerstone of the broader on-demand care landscape. At its core, on-demand care gives consumers the ability to initiate and access appropriate healthcare services on their terms: when, where, and how they need them, without unnecessary friction.

New federal data reinforces just how mainstream that access point has become. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 27.6% of Americans visited an urgent care center at least once in 2024. Among adults ages 18 to 64, that figure reached 28.9%.

The encounter may still begin with an immediate need, but patients increasingly arrive with healthcare histories, follow-up needs, and expectations shaped by digital experiences across the rest of their lives. Urgent care leaders have an opportunity to consider how the principles of on-demand care can support more of that journey while preserving the speed, access, and convenience that made the model successful.

A Bigger Role in Healthcare Access

For some patients, urgent care already occupies a larger place in their healthcare lives than the occasional sick visit. In 2024, 8.6% of U.S. adults reported an urgent care center or a clinic in a drug or grocery store as their usual source of healthcare. Among adults ages 18 to 34, the figure was 12.2%. (CDC)

Those numbers should get the industry’s attention. They suggest that the boundaries between traditional categories of healthcare access are becoming less distinct for at least some consumers.

At the same time, urgent care organizations have expanded what they can provide. Depending on the organization and community, patients may encounter urgent care through occupational medicine, diagnostic services, vaccinations and other preventive services, virtual care, or follow-up related to an earlier visit.

The opportunity is substantial, but expansion deserves a clear strategy. Adding services alone does not define the future of urgent care. Leaders need to determine which healthcare needs fit the model, where their organizations can provide meaningful continuity, and how additional services affect clinical and operational complexity.

Preserve What Patients Value About Urgent Care

Growth into a broader access role should begin with the characteristics that made urgent care valuable in the first place. In many ways, urgent care helped establish the expectations that define on-demand care today: patients can initiate care on their terms and access appropriate services without waiting for a traditional appointment.

As urgent care expands, new services should make appropriate care easier to access without introducing significant delays, complicated processes, or administrative burdens that undermine the accessibility the organization is trying to extend.

Urgent care organizations can evaluate new services based on how naturally they fit within their clinical capabilities, staffing model, patient population, community needs, and existing operations.  They can also consider what happens after the patient leaves. As the range of services grows, information and follow-up become increasingly important parts of delivering a coherent experience.

The future of urgent care may therefore depend as much on coordinating care across settings as expanding the services available within urgent care.

The Visit Has a Before and an After

An episodic encounter still exists within a larger healthcare journey. A patient may arrive with a medication history that affects treatment. An X-ray may uncover a finding that requires additional evaluation. A test result may require follow-up. The patient may need to return to primary care or move to a higher level of care.

Those transitions have long been a challenge across healthcare. Research specifically examining urgent care transitions has emphasized timely, accurate clinician-to-clinician communication and patient engagement when patients move from urgent care to primary care or the emergency department. (PubMed)

As urgent care takes on a larger role in healthcare access, effective coordination across settings becomes increasingly consequential. The quality of an encounter includes the information available when care begins, the information generated during the visit, and how effectively relevant information follows the patient afterward.

This is an area where health technology can play an important role. Digital access can help patients enter care more easily. Accessible clinical information can give providers greater context at the point of care. Communication tools can support instructions and follow-up. Integrated data can help organizations understand what happened across the entire encounter and identify where additional action is needed.

Technology can support that broader on-demand care experience by reducing friction before the visit, giving providers better information during the encounter, and supporting communication and coordination afterward. Urgent care can become easier to access and better coordinated with the patient’s broader healthcare journey without abandoning the episodic operating model that makes it distinct.

Continuity Does Not Require Owning the Entire Patient Journey

As on-demand care expands, urgent care leaders will need to define where greater continuity fits within the model. Primary care has an established role in prevention, chronic disease management, long-term treatment planning, and the ongoing clinician-patient relationship. Urgent care brings its own strengths to the healthcare system, with an operating model built around timely, convenient access to immediate healthcare needs.

Research on urgent care and primary care has raised this same issue for years, examining how urgent care can improve access while maintaining continuity across settings. Communication and collaboration are recurring themes in that research.

For urgent care leaders, that creates a more useful definition of continuity. The organization does not have to become the destination for every healthcare need. It can help make each encounter a better-coordinated part of the patient’s care.

Sometimes that means providing another appropriate service within the urgent care organization. Sometimes it means ensuring the patient understands what should happen next. Sometimes it means making information available to another clinician or setting.

The goal is to reduce the likelihood that each encounter begins and ends as an information island.

Defining the Next Chapter of Urgent Care

The growth of urgent care has already changed where and how Americans seek healthcare. In doing so, the industry helped establish a model of on-demand care built around access, convenience, and the ability for consumers to seek appropriate care on their terms.

Its next chapter may be about how far those principles can extend. There is room to expand access, add services, use technology to reduce friction, create greater continuity, and improve coordination across a patient’s healthcare journey. The organizations that pursue those opportunities will need to balance them against the qualities patients already value: convenience, speed, accessibility, and confidence that they can get the care they need.

Urgent care does not need to own the entire patient journey to play a larger role in it. Its opportunity is to make appropriate care easier to access when and where patients need it, more informed by what came before, and better coordinated with what comes next.