The rise of urgent care in the U.S. is one of the key trends that has dominated healthcare news headlines in recent decades. The growth in urgent care clinics also comes with a need for new strategies to successfully navigate the urgent care business model – including insights on urgent care site selection.
Traditional health systems have historically relied on an “if you build it they will come” approach to real estate. Medical services are concentrated in a specific area and patients are expected to travel to that area for treatment.
But the urgent care business model reverses the traditional healthcare real estate paradigm. Rather than building a large medical center in a central location, urgent care providers need to build a network of small clinics that are strategically positioned to reach patients where they are. Selecting the right sites is fundamental to an urgent care provider’s success.
If you are just getting started in urgent care site selection or want to improve your current site selection strategy, make sure you pay attention to these 4 essentials of a great site.
1. Great Urgent Care Sites Have the Right Types of Consumers in the Trade Area
Businesses cannot survive without customers, and urgent care clinics are no exception. Great sites have the right concentrations of the right types of consumers within the trade area.
But how exactly do you define what the “best type of consumer” is for your urgent care practice? One approach is to use demographic information. For example, you may look for sites that are near high concentrations of families with children. Median income is another demographic metric you may consider.
While demographic information is helpful, it doesn’t tell the full story. Ultimately, you need to know which types of consumers are likely to choose urgent care for their healthcare needs. This is measured by lifestyle metrics called psychographics. Combining demographic and psychographic information through consumer profiling gives you a clear understanding of who your clinics are trying to reach and allows you to identify where pockets of those target consumers are concentrated.
Another element that influences whether a site has your target consumers in the trade area is payer mix. You need to understand whether the payer mix in the trade area around a potential urgent care location matches your business model. If you cater to Medicare/Medicaid patients but the trade area is primarily composed of privately insured consumers, then the site is likely not a good fit for you.
2. Great Urgent Care Sites Offer High Impression Frequency
Impression frequency is a term used in marketing to describe the number of times a consumer is exposed to a brand name. To capture distracted consumers’ attention, you need to regularly put your brand name in front of them to be top of mind when they need your type of services.
Many don’t realize that impression frequency is driven by more than advertisements. In fact, one of the most important sources of impression frequency are brick-and-mortar locations.
Since urgent care is a convenience-based brick-and-mortar business, impression frequency is critical to success. Selecting high visibility sites and leveraging well-placed signage that prospective patients will pass regularly during their daily commute or errands helps to ensure that your clinic is the first that comes to mind when they need healthcare services.
Measuring impression frequency is difficult, but there are some proxies you can consider instead:
- Look for sites with complementary co-tenants. Analyzing your existing location performance can provide insights into whether being located near certain types of businesses helps your business. Perhaps being located in the same shopping center as a grocery store is a strategy that works well for reaching your particular patient base.
- Consider traffic counts and area draw. The higher the traffic in the area, the higher the impression frequency. Traffic counts are one metric to consider, as is the gross leasable area (GLA) of the center you are considering. In general, the larger the center, the higher the assumed traffic volumes.
3. Great Urgent Care Sites Have the Right Balance of Supply and Demand in the Trade Area
Another fundamental of urgent care site selection is ensuring that the site offers the right balance of supply and demand. An area may have high consumer demand for urgent care services, but if the market is already saturated with other providers, it will be difficult to succeed there. Where there is competition, there is often less opportunity for new entrants to capture market share, making it critical to assess both current provider saturation and unmet demand before committing to a site.
Healthcare demand can be measured through use rate information, which is a summarized and more user-friendly version of raw claims data. Supply can be measured through counts of existing facilities and full-time employees (FTEs) by type.
4. Great Urgent Care Sites Excel at Real Estate Fundamentals
While there are many quantitative factors that drive real estate performance, don’t overlook the importance of qualitative factors in site selection. Just as you would interview a job candidate who “looks good on paper,” visit each potential site in person to ensure that it truly is a good fit.
Great urgent care sites are easy to access, have sufficient parking or access to mass transit, and have good visibility and signage placement. They also are near co-tenants that attract similar foot traffic and may be located in retail centers with high traffic and visibility. These classic retail real estate principles matter because of the consumer-oriented nature of urgent care and play a critical role in successful site selection for urgent care facilities.
How Buxton Simplifies the Urgent Care Site Selection Process
While the list above isn’t comprehensive, it’s easy to see that urgent care site selection involves many factors. Evaluating each of those factors can be time consuming, but you can simplify the process using site selection analytics.
Rather than manually tracking the individual metrics outlined above, you can combine them into a site selection model. The model allows you to quickly score a potential site to see how it rates in certain key variables – from core consumer density to competition. When combined with your own qualitative site research, asite selection analysis solution can give you increased confidence in your urgent care site selection process.
Below are the building blocks that make up Buxton’s site selection analysis solutions for healthcare:
Consumer Profiling
The consumer profile defines your core patient to help you understand, at a household level, who your best consumers are, where more people just like them are located, and the value they bring to your organization.
Using the Mosaic 71 segmentation system and Buxton’s extensive data on 120 million households combined with your patient data and performance records, these profiles define your best consumers at the household level. This helps you better understand your patients’ demographics, psychographics, marketing and media consumption preferences, and more.
Profiles can be developed at the overall level or at the subcategory level, with the latter offering a clear comparison of where different patient types reside. By visualizing these patient populations and identifying where there are areas of high concentrations of the ideal patient, healthcare organizations can strategically expand where they are most needed.
Trade Area Analysis
Trade area analysis – an important step in Buxton’s site selection analysis – evaluates the potential patient density in a region and determines how far individuals are willing to travel to a specific location. Incorporating trade area analysis into your site selection strategy allows you to optimize healthcare facilities planning processes by ensuring facilities are strategically placed to meet demand and improve overall accessibility.
Site Scoring Models
When it’s time to make an important real estate decision, a site score model gives you the unbiased, data-backed validation you need to have confidence in moving forward. Buxton’s models incorporate factors like healthcare demand, population metrics, area draw, and relevant competition to evaluate site potential. Tailored to each client’s unique needs, these models ensure selected locations align with the factors that contribute to location success. Alternatively, Buxton offers an off-the-shelf urgent care industry site score model subscription developed based on our industry experience for those seeking a faster implementation that doesn’t require incorporation of first party datasets.
Whether you need a directional industry score or a fully customized forecast, Buxton’s analytics experts offer the right solution for your business stage. Regardless of which modeling approach you decide, our models are designed to help you open home run new locations and avoid expensive mistakes.
Rapid Evaluation Tools
Buxton's rapid evaluation tools streamline the site selection process for healthcare organizations, minimizing risk and reducing decision time. With advanced mapping and reporting software, users can quickly assess site viability by analyzing critical factors like patient demographics, competition, and healthcare demand. These tools offer on-demand insights through detailed maps and reports, and also integrate with site selection models, enabling decision-makers to make informed choices faster. By cutting down the evaluation timeline, healthcare providers can focus on choosing the best locations for new facilities or expansions, improving overall operational efficiency.
Buxton’s tools help reduce uncertainty and ensure data-driven site decisions, empowering healthcare organizations to optimize their growth strategies confidently.
Integration with SCOUT
Buxton integrates our healthcare analytic solutions – profiles, trade area analysis, and models – into SCOUT, our mapping and reporting application, which helps streamline the site evaluation process. This geospatial tool enables healthcare organizations to visualize potential facility locations, assess market conditions, and optimize site decisions on demand.
With SCOUT, users can explore key demographic, psychographic, and demand data to make informed, data-driven choices. Buxton’s solutions provide ongoing market planning support, ensuring that site selection is both strategic and responsive to changing market dynamics.
Learn more about Buxton’s solutions for urgent care site selection.
