The Healthcare Gap: Why Urgent Cares Exist

Driving home after working a 12-hour shift at a local urgent care, I thought about the booming growth urgent care is experiencing. Over the past two years, the organization I am working for projected seven new urgent care centers. The organization opened thirteen instead, exceeding their own expectations. Why? Thinking about this extraordinary demand led to thoughts on the “healthcare gap” that will be covered over several blogs.

Urgent Care Recognizes a Gap in the Healthcare System

The local urgent care CEO and founder saw through personal experience that there is a gap between having a primary care physician (PCP) and actually seeing them. Before opening the first urgent care, it was clear that the most expensive healthcare system in the world has a fundamental problem.

Most Americans have experienced this healthcare gap. Think about when you last called your PCP, if you are lucky enough to have one. Were you able to get an appointment within 24 to 48 hours? Did you actually speak to the PCP with whom you are meant to have a doctor-patient relationship? If not, you experienced the gap in the current healthcare system.

Today’s system wants everyone to sign up with a PCP, yet there is little follow through on actually providing timely access to personalized care. Why? Traditional healthcare systems treat primary care as a business concerned with profit. This emphasis on profit created the healthcare gap.

In the next blog, we will explore how a profit-driven approach to care creates the healthcare gap and the healthcare failures that result.