Inside the Urgent Care Boom

Dan Gorenstein (DG): The number of urgent care centers in the U.S. has doubled over the past decade. It’s made health care more accessible, but some worry it’s a quick fix and that people are bypassing primary care providers who really know their patients history.

Last October, our friends at The Pulse, a health and science podcast from the public radio station WHYY in Philadelphia, dove into the rise of urgent care and how it affects patient care.

Today, we’re bringing you that episode of The Pulse, slightly edited from its original format.

From the studio at the Leonard Davis Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, I’m Dan Gorenstein. This is Tradeoffs.

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Maiken Scott (MS): This is The Pulse – stories about the people and places at the heart of health and science. I’m Maiken Scott.

Comedian Aaron Weber has a bit about why he likes going to urgent care clinics

Aaron Weber (AW): There’s no ego at an urgent care. That’s what’s fun. You go to a doctor’s office, they talk down to you, right? Diplomas on the wall. They’re like, I went to school. I know everything. Urgent care is like, do you have $40? Let’s figure this out together. 

MS: The joke is part of his comedy special “Signature Dish,” and he’s since performed it on the Tonight Show.

AW: So the nurse comes in or face to face, she’s asking me questions. She goes, what are you in for? I said, my nose is clogged. She said, you’ve been taking anything? I said, just Sudafed. And she goes, oh, can you spell that for me?

I was like, Sudafed? I maybe could. I would like you to take a stab at it though, right? Feels like something you should know. I know y’all share a lease with a T-Mobile store, but this feels like day one stuff, honestly. Look, I’ve been taking Ibuprofen as well.

MS: As a comedian, Aaron travels a lot and relies on urgent care when he gets sick on the road. And, just like everything else in his life – it becomes fodder for new jokes. 

AW: And I remember sitting in the waiting room thinking, I think I got a bit out of this already. Once the nurse asked me how to spell Sudafed, I remember thinking, well, this will become a bit on stage. 

MS: When he posted the joke on social media, it killed. It was even popular with people who work in urgent care. 

AW: A couple of weeks ago, I had a big group of urgent care nurses that had seen the bit and they passed it around in their group chats. And they all came out and enjoyed the show together. It made me feel good because I was worried. I never want to be mean to people. And I don’t actually have any animosity towards the urgent care system. They’ve done nothing but take good care of me. And I know what it is when I walk in there. So I’m not trying to make fun of them too bad.

MS: But that “strip mall” association that Aaron described – it’s real. And providers working in urgent care are used to these jokes.

Franz Ritucci is a family physician who started working at an urgent care clinic in south Florida about 30 years ago.

That was the time when those facilities were called doc in a box 

And he remembers the reaction he got when he told other doctors where he worked.

Franz Ritucci (FR): I saw everyone’s eyes kind of go down. It was like, ugh an urgent care.

MS: Urgent care centers have been around since the 1970s, but more recently the expansion in this sector has been explosive. 

FR: Now it has grown, grown like fire, like pouring the kerosene on and you light a match. And that’s what has transpired.

MS: The number of urgent care centers in the U.S. has doubled over the past decade or so, from more than 7 thousand to more than 14 thousand.

Franz says urgent care centers fill a void in the health care market: quick and convenient access.

FR: You call up your primary care provider, you say, little Johnny, little Mary has an ear infection, you know, I want to come in. We can make an appointment in two weeks. Now how does that feel to the patient?

This is not really an emergency department evaluation that I require. I just need to see someone to, you know, take a look in my ear, take a look in my throat. So, I would say the urgent care centers have become the reliever airport for our broken system. 

MS: But – there are questions and concerns about this kind of care. The “doc in the box” label hasn’t fully come off – and some providers are worried that patients are using them in a way that replaces the important role of a primary care physician

On this episode: the rise of urgent care, and how it’s affecting patients 

To get started – let’s take a look at the urgent care work force. Who are the people examining you, making a diagnosis

Pulse reporter Liz Tung had been wondering about that.

Liz Tung (LT): I’ve been lucky — every time I’ve been to an urgent care, the staff has been great, and the clinicians efficient and knowledgeable, but I couldn’t help but wonder — why would they choose to work at a place like this, seeing boring patients like me, when they could be somewhere more exciting like the ER, or rewarding like family medicine? Do they actually enjoy this work? 

MS: So, she decided to find out what brings people to this field.

LT: I’ve been lucky — every time I’ve been to an urgent care, the staff has been great, and the clinicians efficient and knowledgeable, but I couldn’t help but wonder — why would they choose to work at a place like this, seeing boring patients like me… when they could be somewhere more exciting like the ER, or rewarding like family medicine? Do they actually enjoy this work? 

So, I decided to find out. 

Most physicians who work in urgent care come out of family medicine, although the first few I talked to were ER docs — another prominent specialty in the urgent care world. And they told me that, compared to the thrill of the ER, this work is kind of… boring.

Josh Sharp (JS): Urgent care is a lot of people with, you know, I have minor injuries or I think I have a sinus infection or ear infection or I have a rash or…

Will Hocket (WH): So lot of it is sore throat, sniffly nose, healthy kid with a fever. I fell down in my hand hurts type of things.

Eddie Kuo (EK): ​​A lot of procedures, you know, we get a lot of cuts, scrapes, foreign bodies.

WH: Laceration repairs or like a median sutures or just what we would consider quick and easy things.

LT: So, what brings them from the high-stakes life of a bustling ER to a neon-lit office in a strip-mall? 

For Eddie Kuo, it began as a side gig. He’s an emergency medicine physician in Texas who started working in urgent care back in 2013 while he was still a resident. As for his motivation — it was mainly the money.

EK: Residents don’t get paid very much, but as a result, we have opportunities to moonlight. We take full advantage and at the time, the only place that was available to me was in urgent care.

LT: Residents’ salaries are not all that high, especially considering how many hours they work, which, in Eddie’s case, was around 80 a week.

EK: I, once I sat down in residency and did the math and about how much I was making hourly, and it was around $5 to $10 an hour. Whereas moonlighting in an urgent care paid me about $75 to $95 an hour, I believe.

So yeah, I mean, that’s like a, you know, five to 10 fold increase in your hourly pay. So it’s kind of like a no brainer. And at that point, you know, I didn’t make or have that much money. So, you know, there’s when you’re young and you want to do things, you just work those shifts, even though if you’re tired, you just, you do it. So you can afford things.

LT: So, money is a factor, and a lot of urgent care physicians just work a few shifts a month to supplement their income.

But during his 3+ years working in urgent care, Eddie discovered another benefit:  — it allowed him to learn how to call the shots — make treatment decisions independently, without the safety net of an attending watching over his shoulder.

EK: A big learning step for residents is you have to gain that confidence functioning on your own. And moonlighting is like the best way to do it. So it honestly was very scary for me at first, like actually being on my own, but it was a huge confidence booster, getting those patients under my belt, getting that experience.

LT: For young physicians, urgent care can be a great training ground, but it can also be attractive for older doctors, says ER physician Josh Sharp.

JS: I think a lot of people do it as like a transition to retiring, like they don’t want to keep working ER, but they still need employment or they still want to work because, you know, being a doctor is their identity, which I think is a very common thing with older physicians.

LT: And then, there’s the question of hours. Once Eddie was done with residency, he didn’t have to work nearly as much — but, like a lot of ER docs, his start times were all over the place.

EK: These shifts span all hours of the day. So they can start anywhere from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. So the hours constantly are changing.

LT: Which is another thing that attracts ER doctors to urgent care: consistent daytime hours. So, if you have a family and want a more regular workday, or hate working nights – urgent care allows for way more flexibility.  

Emergency physician Will Hocket says some ER doctors switch to urgent care because they’re burned out on emergency medicine. As you might imagine, treating a steady stream of people in really terrible shape — patients with gunshot wounds, overdoses, injuries from accidents, having heart attacks or strokes — can get really, really stressful.

WH: There’s a point where you don’t want to deal with that. It’s not bad to just see people with sore throats or a cough and let them go home and, you know, not have to worry as much.

LT: For other physicians though, like the three ER docs I talked to, sore throats and coughs can get tedious after a while — the monotony can become a grind all on its own. That’s how Eddie started to feel during his time in urgent care — he prefers the high stakes of emergency medicine.

EK: I would definitely say I leave the emergency department feeling more fulfilled because you know, you’re helping a lot of these patients who are very, very sick. We do a lot of life-saving interventions. And that is much more fulfilling than seeing, you know, 15 coughs and colds in a day, you know, sewing up a small cut, giving steroid shots, you know, that sort of thing.

LT: Sometimes, urgent care can also feel more like working in the customer service industry than medicine. Here’s Will.

WH: I find that I didn’t enjoy it as much. To a certain degree, urgent care and a lot of medicine is a less patient doctor relationship client, like a buyer relationship. So there’s an expectation of something and whether that something is medications. So they want pain meds. Well, I paid a $20 copay. I think I should get my opiates refilled. And that’s not actually medically the right answer for every patient.

LT: Eddie says he also perceived the profit motive of urgent care as being more front and center, compared to other medical fields. 

EK: Yes, 100%. My manager at the time will remember saying like, oh, if they have a cold, like make sure they get steroids, it’s going to make them feel better. The data doesn’t show that it’s going to ensure a better outcome or anything like that.

But it’s just one of the things that you did just to keep the patients coming in Because even if you didn’t think they needed antibiotics or anything like that, if they got a steroid shot or prescription, they would still feel like they’re getting something from their visit. 

LT: So — for people trained as ER docs, urgent care sounds like a bit of a mixed bag. But chances are the person seeing you is not a physician.

According to a 2022 survey, only 16% of urgent care providers are physicians — and most of them only work there part-time. Mostly because, according to the people I talked to, doctors are a lot more expensive. The vast majority of providers are what are called “mid-levels” — like nurse practitioners and physician assistants who, anecdotally, seem to like urgent care a lot more than a lot of doctors. 

Take, for instance, Lisa Bishop — a longtime nurse practitioner who started out her career in family practice, along with a bit of emergency medicine, before being recruited by an urgent care center.

Lisa Bishop (LB): And just found that urgent care really felt like the best of both worlds for me.

LT: She got some of the excitement and variety of the ER — never knowing what was coming through the door next — without the stress of dealing with a relentless stream of life-or-death cases, and the fulfillment of family medicine without the endless inpatient followup.

LB: So for me, urgent care just fit my lifestyle better. The autonomy, the procedures. I love the fast paced decision making. And I like the way that it also allowed me to maintain a work-life balance.

LT: One of the reasons Lisa is so much more gung ho about urgent care is that for her, unlike most of the doctors I talked to, it wasn’t just a side gig or a stepping stone to something else — it’s become her career. 

Lisa holds a leadership position at the College of Urgent Care Medicine, an arm of the Urgent Care Association of America. She is also Vice President at Premier Health Consultants, a physician-owned urgent care company. And she used to work as a clinical instructor for a nurse practitioner program, where she made it her mission to design and improve training for future urgent care providers.

LB: So they’re going to need a broad knowledge base, strong procedural skills, the ability to triage who’s safe to send home, who needs to go to the emergency room. You have to have a high level of medical decision-making.

LT: Because, Lisa says, unlike in the ER, most urgent cares don’t have access to advanced testing and scans — which means they need the experience, the exam skills, and the confidence in order to make clinical judgments without those tools.

And that’s a big part of why Lisa does NOT recommend that fresh graduates go straight into urgent care — better, she says, to spend six months or a year in emergency or family medicine so they have the experience to make those judgments, often independently, and in a fast-paced environment.

It can be a steep learning curve — which is why Lisa is passionate about standardizing training for urgent care providers, and getting it officially recognized as its own specialty.

LB: Right now I think sometimes urgent care is viewed as a side gig or something between emergency and family medicine. So I think recognition as a specialty would not only bring standardized training and credentialing, but it would also give patients the confidence that every provider that meets that they’re seeing meets. A certain benchmark. We’re all trained the same way. We all have the same background as far as the type of training and education and procedural skills.

LT: And it might just mean that, whoever sees you at an urgent care — they’re there because they want to be.

DG: That story was reported by Liz Tung.

When we come back, our friends at the Pulse look into the money behind the explosive growth in urgent care, and how urgent care could improve cancer care.

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DG: Welcome back. Today we’re bringing you an episode of The Pulse, a public radio show and podcast from WHYY in Philadelphia.

This episode digs in on the rise of urgent care, and how it’s affecting patient care. Here’s the host of The Pulse, Maiken Scott.

MS: Over the past decade or so, private equity firms have invested billions of dollars into urgent care centers across the U.S. 

These investment companies raise capital from private investors to buy stakes in companies that are not on the stock market.

The infusion of cash can help grow businesses, and ultimately bring more health care options to more people. But, investors want returns on their investment – and private equity companies are often looking to make a quick profit – which can affect care…or entire health systems. 

Across the country, hospitals have shut down after private equity companies took over, so, the stakes here are high. 

Alan Yu looked into the money fueling the growth of urgent care.

Alan Yu (AY): Let’s say you’re an enterprising doctor, and you open an urgent care business. Things are going well. 

Franz Ritucci (FR): You quickly realize that there is growth and financial security as you grow the number of clinics that you have.

AY: That’s physician Franz Ritucci, the president of the American Academy of Urgent Care medicine. 

FR: So you want to have multiples. If you’re a mom and pop clinic, you’ll do well. You could be comfortable. But then you may get the itch, like, I could do more. I could grow. 

AY: And Franz says urgent care centers need to grow and scale up, because they’re profitable when they’re seeing a lot of patients – and a mix of patients.

Urgent care centers do not make much profit from seeing patients with simple things like ear infections 

They can make more profit from seeing patients with more complicated problems, like someone who fell and needs an X-ray, a cast, and a splint

Wanting to grow his business is what brought Peter Hotz to look for investors.  

Peter Hotz (PH): So it’s enabled us to scale from four centers to 16 centers.

AY: Peter is the CEO of Vybe Urgent Care, a chain of clinics in the Philadelphia region 

PH: So we want to give off a healthy vibe, a positive vibe, an energetic vibe. And our original tagline was feel better as soon as you walk in. We wanted people to walk in and feel that sense of comfort and that energy and that we were going to take care of them. So that’s why we’re called vibe.

AY: He says the local private equity firm that invested in his company has been a great business partner

PH: They have never once told me or my team how to run the business, what kind of care to provide or anything like that. They’ve been really a source of capital, a source of judgment and an assistance to us as we’ve had to make challenging decisions as we grow the business.

AY: But private equity investment is not always a good deal for people running urgent care centers  

Physician Franz Ritucci, who we heard from earlier, has been in the urgent care business for over two decades now

He says that for years, private equity firms have been buying urgent care centers. The private equity firm tries to grow the urgent care business

Then they can sell it to another company, or a hospital system, to make a profit. Doctors sometimes ask him for advice when private equity investors approach them with offers

He tells doctors that if the business is thriving, and could do even better, then the investment could be good.

However…

FR: If you need the money to survive, don’t take it, sell off your clinics or, you know, close down, tighten your belt.

AY: That gets to a darker side of private equity investing.

Franz says if an urgent care clinic is already struggling to break even, then private equity investment will just put more pressure on it

FR: They want you to make X number of dollars or at minimum be able to go through 35 to 40 patients a day in order to: a, break even, or have some monies left over. And out of that, you have to pay your salaries and supplies, etc.

Now if you’re hurting that you need the money to grow, then yes, equity is the way and you’ll sell your soul in order to survive and move.

AY: Private equity investors want to see a quick return, says Jessa Loomis. She studies global finance. 

Jessa Loomis (JL): Private equity tries to realize returns over a three to seven year time horizon. That means that they’re looking to realize a profit in a relatively short amount of time. 

AY: Jessa is based at Newcastle University in the U.K. She has researched private equity in health care markets, including urgent care centers.

The profit-driven interest in urgent care centers has also meant that they tend to spring up in areas where there are lots of potential patients – and not in more rural regions where patients really need access.

Jessa says even if an urgent care business goes under, the private equity investor can still sell the business or the land where the urgent care clinics are, and make a profit

JL: Part of that is the financial engineering, financial mechanisms at play that allow them to basically take their returns and run. 

Urgent care clinicians say the pressure to make money can affect patient care. 

Brett Murray, who works both in an emergency room and in urgent care, has become wary of private equity investment companies 

Brett Murray (BM): They are in the business to make money from whatever they’re investing in.

And if they don’t make money from that investment, they’re going to move on and just leave whatever is there to have happen, whatever may. 

AY: Brett says he’s skeptical of private equity investors buying urgent care businesses in particular, because more and faster access to health care does not help patients much if the care is not good. 

For instance, he says a lot of the time he will see patients who come into an urgent care clinic who feel ill, and want an antibiotic to feel better.

BM: We want to help people feel better. But sometimes and more often than not, the answer is time. You need time to get better. Your body needs to fight this illness. We explain why, for example, an antibiotic might not be needed in this case.

And that patient might leave feeling frustrated because they just paid whatever $300 to come to this urgent care and be told, you have a cold, you need to go home and rest and drink water and you’ll feel better eventually versus a patient who comes in and gets a prescription. They’re like, I got something. Now I’m going to suddenly feel better. I really liked that urgent care.

I got in, I got out, I got my meds, I went home, I’m going to keep going back there. 

He says research shows urgent care clinics tend to prescribe more antibiotics than other health care providers 

Using too many antibiotics for illnesses that don’t require them could lead to more antibiotic resistant germs, which is already a problem.

Brett says that is the difference between the kind of care that will leave a patient satisfied and make a profit for a business, versus the kind of care that is ultimately good for the patient and for society in the long run

BM: It’s very easy to go down a slope where we’re focusing more on patients leaving good reviews and coming back because they see the visit as a success and not actually focusing on what the true medical guidelines are. 

AY: He says urgent care fills an important gap in the healthcare ecosystem.

But he is worried about what patients can come to expect from it

Peter Hotz, CEO of the urgent care center chain Vybe, compares his business to a beloved chain of convenience stores 

PH: From a retail standpoint, I’ve always admired Wawa. And people talk about my Wawa when they go to their place. 

Within healthcare, we want to have that same kind of brand connection. We want people to feel like when they walk in our doors, they’re going to get great care and great service.

AY: Whereas Brett Murray says he loves fast food but…

BM: When patients come in and view it like a fast food restaurant there’s a menu you can pick out what you want you need an x-ray of this you need this antibiotic because you always get this when you have a sinus infection that leads to a lot of strain on that doctor-patient relationship when we try and take the time and kind of explain why they either don’t need that or need something different or maybe just need a little bit of time to feel better. 

There’s so much mistrust of the medical system and of physicians lots of people saying physicians are just there to make money etc and I would love if we could get back to a place where we could have a much more kind of productive and trusting relationship with our patients 

MS: That story was reported by Alan Yu.

Urgent care centers provide quick and convenient access to care when your issue is not serious enough for an ER visit, but your primary care physician is booked up til next week. 

Now, some specialty care providers, like cancer centers, are borrowing from this model to provide better care to their patients. Nichole Currie has more.

Nichole Currie (NC): Picture an emergency room lobby — fluorescent lighting, stiff chairs,  perhaps a TV screen, tired receptionists, and in one corner, a triage station, sectioned off with curtains. 

And, of course, there are all the sick people. 

Ellie Wilson (EW): You have parents with their young children who are coughing, stifling, sneezing, you know, not covering anything when they do so. 

NC: Dozens are waiting to be seen. Patience is thin, and germs are everywhere. 

EW: And that’s all coming out in the air. You’ve got a man six seats down from you, puking in a bucket.

NC: This is Ellie Wilson and for her, being in a waiting room like that was not just annoying, it felt life-threatening because she was immunocompromised. 

EW: I was diagnosed in July of 23 with triple-negative breast cancer. That was kind of a big blow. And once we were full throttle with that chemo, it just wreaked havoc over my body.

NC: Ellie went to the emergency room several times during her treatment. Her chemo caused lots of complications, and it amplified issues with an already existing condition. Ulcerative Colitis. 

Halfway through her treatment, her husband Jay was diagnosed with stage 4 liver cancer, which for them, meant double the trips to the ER because of complications. 

EW: I thought to myself, well, here I am coming in with an issue that I didn’t quite know what was yet. And I’m thinking I’m going to have another issue. Because I had to sit in a waiting room and I’m not trying to downplay anybody’s sickness.

But when you have something, when you have a disease like this, and it compromises every inch of your body, you have to think for yourself. You have to think about what the other people around you are doing. And it’s terrifying.

Serious complications from the illness itself or treatment are common with cancer patients –  anything from bleeding, severe pain, fever, shortness of breath, or GI issues like vomiting. 

Where should patients turn when these problems hit late at night or demand immediate attention? 

Some cancer centers have rolled out their own version of urgent care, just for oncology patients. Thoracic oncologist Christopher D’Avella says this approach is just one way for the field to catch up with advances in cancer treatment. 

Christopher D’Avella (CD): In the past, maybe a decade or two ago, all we had to offer them was chemotherapy. And as the care gets more complex, we have to kind of adapt to that complexity of care.

NC: Christopher is an assistant clinical professor of medicine at Penn Medicine and a faculty member at the Penn Center for Cancer Care Innovation in Philadelphia. He says that as treatments become more advanced, patients may experience more complications compared to older treatments. 

CD: So with the advent of immunotherapy, which essentially stimulates your immune system to attack the cancer, there can be complications. Patients can develop lung symptoms, symptoms of their thyroid. They can develop various things that we call toxicity from the treatment that need to be monitored very closely.

NC: Christopher says it would be ideal for patients to have a center available where these acute complications can be addressed, instead of going to the ER. 

CD: Sometimes patients need extra guidance and extra visits to be able to kind of manage the treatment related side effects that can occur.

NC: These centers also offer more specialized expertise than an ER. Take Deirdre Kelly, for example. She’s a nurse practitioner at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York. She works in their urgent care center called the Symptom Care Clinic. 

Deirdre says some complications from cancer treatment would alert emergency medicine doctors, while oncologists may see the bigger picture. 

Deirdre Kelly (DK): For example, patients presenting with a blood clot in their leg or even in their lung. It’s something that we see really commonly in our oncology population. In the non-oncology population, it’s really considered a life-threatening emergency and most patients with that problem would be admitted for blood thinners and for their management.

We see in our patients a lot of times these develop chronically and we can actually treat them safely with blood thinners at home and close follow-up at home. 

NC: Urgent Care centers specialized in oncology care are also set up differently than the ER or a normal urgent care center. Take the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. Their urgent care center is called the direct referral unit, or the DRU.  

Kristin Manley (KM): So I think the biggest difference that our patients see coming to the DRU is that they don’t have to wait. Our patients come in and they’re seen by a physician almost immediately.

NC: That’s Kristin Manely. She’s the Clinical Director of the Hospitals Program at the Fox Chase Cancer Center.

At the referral unit, patients call, and report their symptoms. A nurse then assesses whether or not their center can treat the patient’s symptoms — they either tell the patient to come in, stay home, or go to the emergency room.

KM: So we’re able to triage to prevent those prolonged waits. We’re able to narrow down what we think, you know, what our top,  three things that could be causing this are definitely a much shorter list for us than if you were going to an emergency room.

NC: And because these urgent care practices are affiliated with a cancer center with lots of medical equipment, they can provide a variety of care. Think infusion therapy and more.

KM: We do imaging testing, including X-rays and CAT scans and MRIs. And hopefully our goal is to get our patients symptoms under control, whatever brought them in, and get them home that same day.

NC: The concept of oncology urgent care sounds great. No long waits, oncology experts are ready to treat your complications. But there are some limitations. 

Most of these specialized urgent care clinics are associated with a cancer medical center, and because some people travel long distances to get the best treatment, they can’t always utilize them. Often, patients can only access the urgent care affiliated with their own treatment center, and some centers have limited hours, like being closed on weekends.

And then there is another obstacle. Something Arthur Hong discovered in 2017. 

At the time, Arthur had joined the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas as an associate professor of internal medicine, and he was working on reducing unnecessary hospital admissions. 

Arthur Hong (AH): Sometimes people come to the emergency department. Sometimes they get admitted to the hospital from the emergency department. They didn’t really need to be there as far as I could tell. 

NC: Arthur soon learned that UT Southwestern and an affiliated hospital, Parkland Memorial, had both created an oncology urgent care center. 

AH: And so I got wind of it and I was like, oh, this is actually a solution. And I so I approached them. I I have you guys studied this? Does it work? Is it reducing ED visits and things like that? And they’re like, well, we haven’t done it. Do you want to do it? 

NC: Arthur did some research, and found that the number of patients using the urgent care cancer clinic was small.

AH: So the more immediate question to me was like, why aren’t people using this? I know people don’t like going to the emergency department, right? Whether you’re insured or not, poor or not, who likes to wait or have an unpredictable wait in the emergency department? Particularly if you’re a patient who’s getting chemotherapy, you’ve been told up and down your immune system is being crushed. Do you really want to be waiting in a waiting room, even pre-pandemic?

NC: Arthur interviewed patients and found a pretty straightforward answer. People didn’t know about it. In response, he says Parkland Memorial brainstormed new ways to get the word out. They got creative.

AH: We turned like a dry text information sheet that was very useful into like a colorful flyer, you know, translated it into the language. Like, Spanish is a big need in the patients that they serve. 

NC: They then thought about the center’s phone number; patients call this number to be triaged before coming to the center. 

AH: And then actually I was like, you know, this is just like a phone line. How do you know to trust it? Right? So I said, ah, let’s get a picture of all the triage nurses and let’s put them on here, right? Little trading cards. 

NC: And these little tweaks have paid off in the end, for the center and the patients. 

AH: With the flyer, with some of these initial activities, we’ve about tripled the volume of calls since prior to all of that. We still have a lot of work to do, but it’s been noticeable and consistent. And it’s been really kind of gratifying, I think, for them too, because they’re being able to help more folks.

MS: That story was reported by Nichole Currie.

That’s our show for this week. The Pulse is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia – You can find us wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks to the team at the podcast “Urgent Care Rap” podcast team at Hippo Education for their help with this week’s episode.

Our health and science reporters are Alan Yu and Liz Tung.

Charlie Kaier is our engineer. This week, we had additional engineering from Diana Martinez. Our producers are Nichole Currie and Lindsay Lazarski.

I’m Maiken Scott, thank you for listening!

DG: Thanks to Maiken and the rest of the team at The Pulse for sharing this episode today. 

I’m Dan Gorenstein, this is Tradeoffs.