Recognize the Signs
On-demand care only works when patients can easily find it, access it, and move from looking for care to receiving it. Friction before the visit can create extra work for patients and staff while allowing demand the clinic has already generated to disappear.
Does This Sound Familiar?
Patients still have to call for things they could handle themselves
Routine questions, scheduling, registration, and other common needs create extra steps for patients and more work for staff.
Online pre-registration doesn’t always eliminate work at check-in
Patients may provide information before they arrive, but staff still have to re-enter, correct, or collect information at the front desk.
The patient relationship becomes harder to maintain after the visit
Without consistent communication and convenient digital touchpoints, clinics have fewer opportunities to gather feedback, support next steps, and make it easier for patients to return.
Check Your Performance
Once you recognize that patient access may need attention, look at how easily people can move from needing care to receiving it and how much staff assistance that journey requires. Start with the performance signals you can already track, then use a few simple tests to see where patients may be encountering friction.
Start With the Signals:
Call Answer Rate
Track: How many incoming patient calls are answered versus missed
Phone demand can reveal something website traffic cannot: patients actively trying to interact with your clinic. A high number of missed calls can indicate that some patients trying to interact with your clinic are encountering a barrier before reaching the next step.
A 2025 Journal of Urgent Care Medicine article cited an analysis of 7,000 medical-practice calls in which 42% went unanswered during business hours. The analysis was broader than urgent care, so use it as context rather than an urgent care benchmark.
What it can tell you: Whether patients can reliably reach the clinic when they need staff assistance
Pair it with: Call-to-appointment or call-to-visit conversion, if available, to see whether answered demand actually progresses to care
Online Scheduling Use
Track: How many patients use your digital scheduling or reservation option and whether usage changes over time
Online scheduling can reduce dependence on the phone while giving patients another way to act when they decide they need care.
In one urgent care study published in the Journal of Urgent Care Medicine, 37.5% of patients used the online scheduler after implementation. The intervention also reduced arrival-to-doctor time from a median of 28 minutes to 25 minutes and reduced variation in patient arrivals throughout the day.
These results come from one organization rather than an industry benchmark, but they demonstrate why online scheduling deserves to be measured as both an access and operational signal.
What it can tell you: Whether patients are using the digital access options you provide
Look closer if: Online scheduling is available but adoption remains low, or a meaningful number of patients begin the process without completing it, if your system allows you to see abandonment
Work Remaining at Check-In
Track: How often staff re-enter, correct, or collect information patients already provided digitally
Digital pre-registration should remove work from arrival rather than simply move data collection to another screen.
Experity reports that online preregistration saves staff approximately four minutes per patient on average. At 40 patients per day, that represents roughly 160 minutes of staff time.
What it can tell you: Whether digital intake is actually reducing front-desk work
What to look for: Which tasks still require staff involvement after a patient has completed pre-registration, especially repeated data entry, corrections, insurance issues, or missing information
Patient Feedback and Reviews
Track: Rating trends and, more importantly, what patients are actually saying
Reviews can function as operational data. A 2026 Journal of Urgent Care Medicine analysis examined 3.1 million Google reviews across 3,665 urgent care centers and found clear differences in the themes associated with positive and negative experiences.
The goal is to understand what patients consistently experience, rather than simply generate more five-star reviews. Recurring themes can reveal operational issues that an overall rating may obscure.
What it can tell you: Which parts of the patient experience are consistently visible to patients
How to use it: Track themes as well as ratings. Categorize negative feedback by access, phone response, registration, wait time, communication, provider interaction, billing, or follow-up and look for patterns over time
Put It to the Test
Your performance signals can point you toward a potential problem. These hands-on checks can help you see what is happening behind the numbers and where patients or staff encounter friction.
Run a Front-Door Leak TestFor one week, gather the signals showing how people are trying to access your clinic: Inbound Calls | Answered Calls | Online Scheduling Starts/Completions, if Available | Direction Requests | Completed Visits Look across the measures for signs that people are trying to access care but encountering friction before a visit. Ask:
The goal is to identify where existing demand may be encountering friction before you invest more resources in generating additional demand. |
Mystery-Shop Your Own ClinicHave someone your front-desk team does not recognize contact the clinic as a prospective patient. Try three common scenarios relevant to your organization and ask:
Then compare the answers with the access experience your website, scheduling tools, and internal processes are designed to provide. Repeat the exercise digitally. Search for the clinic from a phone, choose a location, try to schedule, and complete as much pre-registration as possible. Count the places where a patient has to stop, repeat information, change channels, or ask for help. |
Interpret What You Find
What you find in the exercise can point to different types of friction. Use the highlighted patterns to decide where to investigate and focus your improvement efforts.
Don’t Fix the Wrong Problem: More Demand Won’t Fix a Leaky Front Door
When patient volume disappoints, the instinct may be to increase advertising, improve search visibility, or generate more awareness.
First determine whether the clinic is already losing people who are trying to access care.
If calls go unanswered, scheduling creates friction, staff provide conflicting access instructions, or patients repeatedly describe the same experience problem, sending more people into the same process can increase activity without producing the expected visits.
Call or website activity is strong, but visit volume is flat
Investigate whether patients are getting through, finding usable availability, and completing the next step before investing more in demand generation. If the gap occurs between initial interest and access, focus on making information and care options easier to find and use.
Online scheduling exists, but usage remains low
Test the experience before assuming patients prefer calling. Look at whether scheduling is easy to find, mobile-friendly, understandable, and consistently promoted by staff. If patients encounter unnecessary steps or need assistance to complete the process, focus on removing that friction.
Patients preregister, but check-in still requires substantial staff work
Look at which information fails to carry forward and what staff still need to verify, correct, re-enter, or collect. Focus on the handoff between what patients complete themselves and what happens when they arrive.
Patient feedback repeatedly points to the same experience problem
Treat the recurring theme as operational data. Look for where that issue enters the patient journey and whether it is concentrated at a particular location, time, or stage of care.
Performance differs significantly by location
Investigate the outliers before making an organization-wide change. Compare access, call handling, scheduling use, reviews, patient volume, and local market conditions to identify what is different.
See What’s Possible
These customer examples show what can happen when clinics make it easier for patients to move from looking for care to accessing it. The results also illustrate how changes at the front door can influence both patient volume and what happens after arrival.
More Than 50% Converted From Click to Reservation
At Pentucket Medical, more than half of patients who clicked its “skip the wait” link made a reservation before leaving the site or visiting a competitor’s site. Online reservations grew 200% over 12 months and ultimately represented more than 15% of total patient volume.
Pentucket also reported that 90% of online patients said the reservation feature influenced their decision to choose the organization.
What it shows: Digital access can influence whether existing patient demand turns into a visit.
Two to Three Times More Online Patient Volume
MedAccess Urgent Care reported increasing online patient volume by two to three times at each of its clinics after implementing Experity Patient Engagement. The organization also reported that 95% of patients were called back on time or early at the participating locations.
What it shows: Patient access and clinic operations are connected. How patients enter the system can affect both demand and what happens after arrival.
Connect the Problem
Making it easier for patients to find and access care can reduce friction before the visit. The information patients provide, the tasks they complete, and the communication they receive also affect what happens after they arrive.
Connecting those interactions with the rest of the operation can reduce repeated work as information moves through check-in, care delivery, payment, and follow-up.
One Connected Platform for Urgent Care
The Experity Urgent Care Platform connects Patient Engagement, Patient Care, and Revenue Cycle capabilities around the full urgent care journey, helping clinics support on-demand care from the first patient interaction through care delivery and what comes next.
Keep Working on Your Operation
Patient access can affect what happens throughout the visit and beyond. Choose another challenge to take a closer look at another part of your operation.
Move More Patients Through the Clinic →
Give Staff and Providers More Time →
Protect More of the Revenue You’ve Earned →