Urgent care association launches national awareness campaign

A new national awareness campaign led by the Urgent Care Association of America (UCAOA) wants everyone to know – patients, providers, insurers, employers and governments – that urgent care centers are available in communities across the country and what services are available in them.

"… (W)e recognized that the main reason that people don't necessarily use urgent care is because they don't even know that it's there and they don't necessarily understand what they do there," said Lou Ellen Horwitz, executive director of UCAOA, a member organization for urgent care providers.

"Urgent care is really there when either your primary care doctor is not available or it's too serious for that person or it's not serious enough for the ER," she said.

Horwitz acknowledges that the campaign may result in more business for urgent care centers and less for emergency rooms and possibly some doctors' offices, but with the national focus on providing appropriate care to patients as well as driving down the costs of healthcare, she sees urgent care centers as a reasonable solution, especially when considering the high cost of care at emergency rooms.

[See also: Healthcare leaders report concerns about overcrowded EDs.]

"If we're going to hold the emergency room accountable for delivering what they're created to deliver, we need to stop sort of glossing over some of their issues … (so) let's go ahead and pull that non-emergency care out of there and see what we've got," she said. "If it really isn't the issue then that's going to uncover what their real struggles are."

UCAOA's national campaign toolkit, which includes marketing materials, is available for free download for anyone to use.