7:15am – 8:00am

Conference Registration & Networking Breakfast

8:00am – 8:15am

Chairperson’s Opening Remarks

8:15am – 9:00am

Creating the Ultimate Urgent Care Patient Experience

For owner-operators truly committed to creating the ideal urgent care experience—a thriving operating model that benefits patients, employees and investors alike —a commitment to operational excellence, a perfecting of the patient experience, and the embrace of an empowered, engaged employee culture must form the bedrock principles of their practice. Driven largely by millennials and Gen Xer’s who place a premium on convenience, alongside Baby Boomers utilizing their newly acquired Medicare benefits, urgent care centers continue to experience a significant surge in demand. Despite this huge expansion in urgent care volume and utilization, though, some markets are already experiencing oversaturation, which has led to fierce competition for local patients’ urgent care spend. So even with the ready growth and profit potential available in owning-operating a center or chain of urgent cares, merely placing a grand opening sign in front of a new clinic or maintaining a mediocre status quo in an established clinic in no way guarantees patients beating down your door, nor a well-oiled, humming operation. This session will explore creating the kind of ideal urgent care experience that delights patients, provides workplace fulfillment for your staff, and drives the kind of robust revenues that garner your center/chain the kind of high valuation that makes it an attractive asset to potential investors and buyers.

9:00am – 9:45am

Sourcing, Recruiting, and Retaining the Best Talent in Urgent Care

The urgent care industry is booming with an increasing competition for the same healthcare consumers and healthcare employees. How do you find the right talent to offer that exceptional experience for the patient? What factors decide whether they will accept your employment offer? What factors play into retaining the employee long term and how do you prevent poaching from your competitors? This lecture will discuss all the factors and considerations in finding and keeping the best talent to make the urgent care successful.

9:45am – 10:15am

Networking & Refreshments Break

10:15am – 11:00am

Determining the Right Staffing Model for Your Urgent Care Center
Staffing is a complex process of hiring, training, compensating, positioning and assessing employees to enable operational success. In the urgent care setting, practice managers face challenges recruiting and retaining employees to staff practices due to nonstandard operating hours. Determining appropriate staffing models is important. Practice managers must consider budgets, the number and skill of staff needed, staff productive and non-productive costs, staff/provider satisfaction and state regulations. This session will explore how to determine the right staffing model for your urgent care center, including strategies that create greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

11:00am – 11:45am 

Crafting a Winning Urgent Care Business Plan: Keys to Success

If a business doesn’t work on paper, it won’t work in real life.  Whether you are starting or growing an urgent care center, this session will cover the steps in developing a comprehensive business plan to assure profitability. We will discuss essential elements such as market analysis, financial projections, capital requirements, staffing and marketing strategies. Attendees will learn how to identify unique selling propositions, optimize operational efficiency, and foster partnerships to ensure the long-term success and growth of their urgent care facility in a competitive healthcare landscape.

11:45am – 12:30pm

Is Specialization the Future of Urgent Care?

Urgent care has historically been viewed as a setting where patients could present with anything short of life- or limb-threatening complaints. And that identity has served the industry well, as evidenced by nearly constant growth over several decades. As time has wore on, though, it has become evident that there are business opportunities to be had by addressing niches with special needs. There is a slight—but growing—trend toward specialization within the industry. Further, it’s become more common for urgent care centers to have an affiliation with multispecialty groups, including true primary care practices. This session will explore this growing trend and how urgent care operators are presenting themselves to the healthcare marketplace.

12:30pm – 1:30pm

Luncheon

1:30pm – 2:15pm

Ancillary Services and Their Importance in Urgent Care 

When you’re launching a new urgent care clinic or becoming a hybrid clinic with new service lines, you have so many things to consider. One other thing to consider is ancillary services, which include a wide range of healthcare service options that you may offer patients to support your urgent care clinic. For startups, it may be best to focus on your daily operations in the first few months after launch, but it’s a good idea to be on the lookout for other specialty healthcare services that might help you increase patient flow and revenue, and fill a need for healthcare consumers in your community. This session will explore reasons you may want to supplement your urgent care business with primary care, occupational medicine, or other ancillary service lines.

2:15pm – 3:15pm

Panel: Ensuring the Adoption of Effective Practice Guidelines and Standards of Care within Urgent Care Centers

This session will examine effective practices in overseeing quality of healthcare at urgent care center. Topics to be discussed will include:

• Standards that urgent care centers should adapt to maintain quality of care
• Reporting clinical outcomes and customer satisfaction
• What are the best practices in ensuring quality and satisfaction?

3:15pm – 3:45pm

Networking & Refreshments Break

3:45pm – 4:30pm

Workplace Violence Prevention and Response in the Urgent Care Setting

Workplace violence in the urgent care clinic setting has implications not necessarily seen in other healthcare settings. These implications include a variety of rural and urban clinic locations, varying degrees of physical security in the clinic space, a diverse patient population that may have behavioral and mental health needs, along with a potential lack of organizational resources and security officer presence.  Clinic staff are dealing with violence from patients, and in the form of lateral (worker on worker) and hierarchical (supervisor or provider on worker) abuse. Nurses and providers performing telehealth visits, answering phone calls, and answering messages via the patient portal are also faced with verbal violence and cyber-incivility. It is necessary to encourage timely reporting of all workplace violence events to gain an understanding of the needs of the staff, as workplace violence in healthcare is noted to be highly underreported.

Staff Perception of Safety surveys and clinic security risk assessments can highlight specific needs of the staff and physical clinic space. These two types of assessments, along with training on de-escalation techniques and the use of patient flagging in the medical record can help prevent workplace violence.  Tools such as clinic specific Safety Action Plans, workplace violence response badge buddies and mobile duress buttons can all improve our staff members’ safety and their response during a workplace violence event. Finally, leader development is essential so that their response to reports of workplace violence, as well as the staff debriefings they perform after an event are timely and appropriate. It is essential that urgent care clinics take a proactive approach to workplace violence that is comprehensive and inclusive of tactics intended for prevention, as well as response both during and after an event.

4:30pm – 5:15pm

Developing an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy for Your Urgent Care Center

Explore the rapidly evolving world of the Internet, social media and mobile marketing and learn how digital marketing can be a powerful ally that strengthens your overall marketing plan. Consumers increasingly rely on search engines and other digital platforms to get information regarding the product or service they intend to buy, and healthcare services are no exception. In this session, we will identify key digital marketing platforms, techniques and strategies and develop a toolkit that forms the foundation for a comprehensive and effective digital marketing plan.

5:15pm

End of Day One

7:15am – 8:00am

Networking Breakfast

8:00am – 8:15am

Chairperson’s Remarks

8:15am – 9:00am

Successful Integration of Occupational Medicine and Urgent Care

Urgent care and occupational medicine complement each other making them natural partners in the urgent care setting. This presentation is directed toward urgent care managers, physicians, and entrepreneurs who wish to begin an occupational Medicine, or grow their current occupational medicine business in both volume and profitability. This session will explore the value proposition of occupational medicine and how to leverage KPIs and quality medical care to become market leaders in your community.

9:00am – 9:45am

Data-Driven HR: Simplifying Staffing Decisions for Healthcare Success

Nearly every manager or administrator will tell you that managing the staff is their biggest headache and the most unpredictable element in their week. How do you decide and communicate raises, promotions, reprimands, job tasks and other staffing decisions? How do you implement bonuses to get the staff to work towards the goals you set? Using data-based tools such as quizzes, audits, a staff satisfaction survey, annual peer review, performance improvement plan and other data points will make every HR decision simple, less emotional and less time consuming.

9:45am – 10:15am

Networking & Refreshments Break

10:15am – 11:00am

Right Plan, Right Person, Right Process, Right Care: A Blueprint for Urgent Care Quality

This session will examine effective practices in crafting a comprehensive quality program within urgent care settings. It will show the vital relationship between high quality and operational effectiveness, and the key strategic levers impacting this. It will demonstrate how a robust quality and performance improvement program provides structure and processes to assess and enhance care quality and service by promoting evidence based best practices that improve patient outcomes, promote patient safety, reduce risks, and prevent adverse events.

Topics will include:

• Developing a quality program built around a just culture, accountability and improved outcomes
• Designing a quality program plan which defines system assessment and process design, monitoring and analysis of data and information, reporting of clinical and process outcomes, as well as methods of achieving and sustaining improved performance.
• Identifying strategies to impact key drivers:
  • Right person – workforce optimization
  • Right process – operational efficiency
  • Right care –performance indicators to drive optimal care delivery models

11:00am – 11:45am

Navigating the Competitive Landscape: Strategies for Urgent Care Success in a Crowded Market

As the demand for convenient and accessible healthcare services grows, the number of urgent care centers continues to rise, creating an increasingly competitive market. This session will share insights and experiences on how urgent care centers can effectively differentiate themselves and thrive in a crowded landscape. We will discuss key strategies such as developing unique service offerings, building strong brand recognition, forming strategic partnerships, and leveraging digital marketing to attract and retain patients. The discussion will also explore the importance of understanding local market dynamics, identifying target demographics, and adapting to evolving consumer preferences. Attendees will gain valuable perspectives on how to position their urgent care centers for long-term success in a rapidly evolving and competitive healthcare environment.

11:45am

Conference Concludes