How many urgent care centers are in each U.S. state?

For more information on the latest urgent care trends, check out our Healthcare Insights on the top urgent care clinics ranked by patient population.

What services do urgent care clinics provide?

An urgent care center is a medical facility that provides immediate medical treatment for non-life-threatening medical conditions. These centers are open for extended hours, including evenings and weekends, and do not require appointments, allowing patients to receive medical care on a walk-in basis.

Urgent care clinics are equipped to treat a wide range of conditions, including minor injuries, illnesses, and infections that require prompt medical attention but aren’t serious enough to warrant a visit to the emergency room.

How do urgent care clinics differ from retail clinics?

Retail clinics and urgent care clinics are grouped together as convenient care clinics because both offer extended hours and accept walk-in appointments. The main difference between retail clinics and urgent care centers is the level of care that they provide. Retail clinics treat a limited range of minor, acute conditions, such as allergies, colds, and infections.

Urgent care clinics, which have on-site diagnostic equipment and procedure rooms, can offer a broader range of care for non-life-threatening conditions that need immediate attention, such as splinting and casting for broken bones or minor laceration and wound repair.

To qualify as an urgent care clinic in Definitive Healthcare’s ClinicView product, a facility must meet the American Academy of Urgent Care Medicine and the Urgent Care Association of America's primary requirements. These include:

• Accept walk-in patients
• Offer extended hours
• Treat a broad spectrum of illnesses and injuries
• Procedure room for performing minor medical procedures (e.g., stitches, casts, low-risk surgery under a local anesthetic only)
• Multiple exam rooms
• On-site diagnostic equipment (e.g., phlebotomy and x-ray)
• Communication lines with local hospitals for streamlined transfers to ERs

What’s the difference between urgent care and an emergency room in the U.S.?

Urgent care clinics and emergency rooms serve very different purposes in the healthcare system. As mentioned above, urgent care centers provide medical care for conditions that require prompt attention but are not life-threatening. Emergency rooms, on the other hand, are equipped to handle life-threatening medical conditions like heart attacks, strokes, severe bleeding, loss of consciousness, and more.

Emergency rooms also operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Urgent care centers are not designed for patients to stay overnight, though many facilities are open beyond regular office hours, including evenings and weekends.

Finally, due to the more critical level of care required and resources available, services provided in an emergency room are typically more expensive than those in urgent care centers.

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