7:15am – 8:00am
Conference Registration & Networking Breakfast

8:00am – 8:10am
Chairperson's Opening Remarks

8:10am – 8:50am
Choosing the right point-of-care laboratory platform: an operator's playbook for Urgent Care
Point-of-care diagnostics are rapidly transforming urgent care operations. Advances in technology have expanded the range of testing options available to operators while simultaneously raising patient expectations for rapid answers and immediate treatment decisions. As a result, selecting the right laboratory platform has become increasingly complex. Urgent care leaders must balance workflow efficiency, staffing realities, reimbursement variability, quality oversight, regulatory requirements, clinical utility, and the total cost of ownership when evaluating diagnostic solutions.

This session provides urgent care leaders with a practical framework for evaluating and implementing POC laboratory platforms in real-world urgent care environments. Using operational case studies and current market examples, participants will learn how to align diagnostic strategies with patient volumes, staffing models, stewardship goals, and financial sustainability.

The discussion will move beyond “more testing is better” and focus on selecting the right test, on the right platform, for the right clinical setting.

Christopher Chao, MD
Medical Director
Urgent Care, WakeMed Health and Hospital
Past President, College of Urgent Care Medicine

8:50am – 9:30am
Syndrome Testing in Urgent Care - Meaningful Results at the Point of Care
In today’s fast-paced healthcare environment, urgent care centers must deliver rapid, accurate diagnoses to optimize patient outcomes and improve provider efficiency. Today we will update and explore innovations in syndrome testing designed specifically for the urgent care setting. This session will highlight how emerging technologies amplify diagnostic accuracy, streamline workflows, and support timely clinical decisions. Physicians and medical providers will gain insights into practical applications that will not only enhance patient care but also strengthen the overall value of urgent care in the broader healthcare ecosystem.

Paul Nanda, MD, FCUCM
Chief Medical Officer
TGH Urgent Care powered by Fast Track

9:30am – 10:00am
Networking & Refreshments Break

10:00am – 10:40am
When Five Minutes Means Three Hours: Competing Against Hospital ER Marketing
Hospital ERs are advertising "5-minute wait times" and claiming to be "better than urgent care" through clever metric manipulation and massive marketing budgets. This session examines the competitive threat from hospital-backed urgent care and ER marketing including how they use provider-in-triage models to game wait time metrics, why their facility fees make them expensive despite marketing promises and strategies for educating patients about the urgent care value proposition. You'll learn how to respond to aggressive hospital marketing, communicate your actual speed and cost advantages and defend your market position.

• Understanding hospital ER wait time metrics vs. actual patient experience
• Marketing messages that resonate: total visit time, cost transparency, convenience
• Data sources for countering misleading hospital claims (CMS reporting)
• Partnership opportunities vs. competitive positioning with hospital systems

Leah Dodyk
Regional Director of Operations
AFC Urgent Care, Connecticut

10:40am – 11:20am
The Generational Flip: Understanding Your Changing Patient Demographics
Patient demographics in urgent care are shifting dramatically with Gen Z and Millennials over-indexing on visits while Baby Boomers under-utilize despite greater medical needs. This session examines what's driving generational differences in urgent care utilization and what it means for operations. You'll explore why younger patients prefer urgent care over primary care, how digital natives expect to interact with healthcare and operational changes that better serve different age cohorts. The discussion includes technology adoption, communication preferences and service design for diverse generational expectations.

Alan Ayers
President
Urgent Care Consultants

11:20am – 11:50am
Aptitude Session

Qiang (Jackson) Gong, Ph.D.
COO
Aptitude Medical Systems, Inc.

11:50am – 12:30pm
More Staff Won't Solve Your LWBS: Frontline Strategies to Reduce Patient Walkouts
We hear a lot about door-to-doc times — but the patient experience begins at the front door, not when the provider walks in the exam room. More staff isn't always the answer — when labor is the largest controllable expense and call-outs are unpredictable, urgent care operations leaders frequently have to protect LWBS with the team they have, not the team they wish they had. This session reframes LWBS reduction as both prevention and response: designing the patient experience intentionally so escalation rarely starts, and recognizing and de-escalating it when it does. Attendees will learn the behavioral cues that predict a walkout, and how small intentional choices — early rooming, staff friendliness and visibility, touchpoint frequency — make staying easier than leaving. The session also covers scripting and huddles that equip frontline teams to manage perception during the highest-pressure moments. Grounded in operational experience across a large urgent care and primary care network, this session offers concrete language and practical tools that can be applied on the next shift — even on short-staffed days.

Cynthia Stevens, FNP, MBA
Vice President of Operations
FastPace Health

12:30pm – 1:30pm
Luncheon

1:30pm – 2:15pm
Radical Empathy: Shining Bright in the Places That Harden Most
In healthcare, patients often encounter us during moments of fear, pain, uncertainty, or vulnerability, and in those moments, empathy becomes part of the care itself. In this session, registered nurse and healthcare leader Casey Micheil reframes radical empathy not as a soft skill, but as both a powerful patient experience tool and an actionable leadership framework. Drawing from leadership experience in a high-volume academic urgent care center, Casey shares real-world stories and evidence-informed strategies that demonstrate how empathy can strengthen trust, improve team culture, reduce emotional harm, and shape the way patients experience care. Participants will leave with practical tools to operationalize empathy across frontline interactions, leadership practices, and system-level workflows, restoring humanity to the moments that matter most.

Casey Micheil, BSN, RN, CNML
Practice Manager, Urgent Care
UCI Health

2:15pm – 3:15pm
Panel: Independent vs. Hospital-Affiliated vs. Corporate—Different Models, Different Challenges
Independent operators, hospital-affiliated urgent care centers and corporate chains face fundamentally different challenges and opportunities. This panel brings together leaders to discuss competitive advantages, operational constraints, capital access, regulatory pressures and strategic positioning. Panelists will share honest perspectives on what works in their model, what they envy about other models and where they see the urgent care market heading. The conversation addresses consolidation trends, partnership opportunities and whether independent operators can remain viable long-term.

Paul Nanda, MD, FCUCM
Chief Medical Officer
TGH Urgent Care powered by Fast Track

Alan Ayers
President
Urgent Care Consultants

Christopher Chao, MD
Medical Director, Urgent Care, WakeMed Health and Hospital
Past President, College of Urgent Care Medicine

Alan Ayers
President
Urgent Care Consultants 

3:15pm – 3:45pm
Networking & Refreshments Break

3:45pm – 4:30pm
Revenue Cycle Optimization: Getting Paid for the Care You Provide
Many urgent care centers provide excellent clinical care but leave money on the table through poor revenue cycle management. This session examines common revenue cycle problems in urgent care including undercoding, incomplete documentation, claim denials, patient collections and payer contract negotiations. You'll learn about coding optimization, documentation improvement, denial management processes and technology tools that improve collections. The speaker shares specific metrics to track, benchmarks for performance and interventions that move revenue cycle effectiveness.

Connor Verbruggen MS, MBA, PA-C
Associate Division Head
Trinity Health-IHA Urgent Care

4:30pm – 5:15pm
Operational Efficiency: Throughput Without Burning Out Your Team
Higher patient volume only improves profitability if you can maintain reasonable throughput without excessive staffing costs or provider burnout. This session explores workflow optimization, staffing models, technology tools and process improvements that enable efficient operations. You'll learn about patient flow design, triage protocols, task delegation, provider productivity benchmarks and identifying bottlenecks. The discussion includes real examples of centers that improved throughput sustainably versus those that pushed too hard and created turnover problems.

• Workflow analysis tools for identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies
• Staffing ratios and productivity benchmarks for different volume levels
• Technology investments that genuinely improve throughput vs. expensive distractions
• Provider scheduling models that balance efficiency with sustainable workloads

David Vaynman
Director of Operations
MetroMed Urgent Care

5:15pm
End of Day One