Want to Grow Your Urgent Care Practice? Start Doing Occupational Medicine

Did you know adding occupational medicine to your urgent care center’s service lines is a great way to drive revenue and increase overall patient volumes? With the right strategy in place, you can use occupational medicine to grow your urgent care practice.

The Benefits of Offering Occupational Medicine

Occupational medicine is such a natural fit for urgent care because it allows urgent care centers to continue delivering services during non-peak periods, using its staff more efficiently and increasing patient volume. While urgent care is typically busiest during the cold and flu season – usually December through April – occupational medicine visits typically increase when companies are hiring during the summer months of June through August. Workplace injuries also typically spike during the summer months when construction season is in full swing. Urgent care centers can draw in patients during their off-season by taking advantage of this opposing seasonality.

Although workplace injuries drive the majority of revenue for occupational medicine contracts, urgent care centers can also use occupational medicine to further fill those non-peak periods by scheduling employer paid services (drug screens and physicals) during those slower times of day when episodic visits have decreased. This helps you ensure you use your staff as efficiently as possible so no one is standing around with nothing to do during your “off” season.

Collecting payment can sometimes be easier with occupational medicine because companies are required by law to carry workers’ compensation insurance that pays their preventive and compliance services, or they are required to demonstrate their ability to self-insure. Some companies are willing to set up Net/15 terms for occupational medicine services in which they pay for services within 15 days after being invoiced. This can mean some steady revenue for your urgent care center if you build solid relationships with several area employers.

Adding Occupational Medicine at Your Urgent Care

Ready to add occupational medicine at your urgent care center? These should be on the top of your planning list:

• Complete Contracting and Credentialing – Just like the contracting and credentialing process you went through with private health insurance carriers, you might need to complete contracting and credentialing with workers’ compensation payors before you can get reimbursed for occupational medicine services. Although contracting and credentialing may not be needed in every state, it would be beneficial to reach out to worker’s comp carriers in your area to be sure that you are set up with specific carriers or a network if necessary.
• Identify Potential Clients – It’s up to you to make connections and build relationships with potential occupational medicine clients. Pull together a list of target companies in your area and their decision-makers
• Create a Marketing Program – If you don’t have someone solely responsible for marketing at your urgent care center, make sure marketing your new occupational medicine program doesn’t get left to the wayside.
• Have a System for Client Protocols – It is absolutely essential to have a stellar system in place for employer profiles and protocols. These are specific to each individual company and outline the guidelines for care, the steps to follow workplace injuries, specific billing requirements, etc. Some urgent care centers handle employer profiles and protocols using paper binders, but the best way to organize all of this information is through an employer portal. This will allow the employer to log on and access all of their information on demand.

For urgent care providers who would like to grow their practices, adding occupational medicine is the logical next step. Occupational medicine is exceptionally complementary to the urgent care model, and with a strategic approach, it can help urgent cares increase their revenue and patient volumes.

Eliminate the typical time-consuming administrative hassles of managing multiple occupational medicine accounts with Practice Velocity’s employer portal — your competitive advantage in getting occupational medicine clients.