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A decade ago, urgent care was still viewed by many healthcare professionals (HCPs) as a peripheral convenience setting: useful for minor illnesses, but hardly central to the healthcare ecosystem. That perception no longer reflects reality.
Today, it is difficult to walk through most major metropolitan cities or suburban retail corridors without passing multiple urgent care storefronts. The category has expanded rapidly across the United States (and other countries, notably the UK), fueled by consumer demand, primary care shortages, changing patient expectations, and the growing preference for on-demand healthcare access.
And increasingly, pharmaceutical companies are recognizing that urgent care is becoming an important setting for commercial decision-making, patient engagement, vaccination, testing, prescribing, and referral activity.
Over the past several years, we have seen a meaningful increase in clients requesting that our researchers include HCPs who work in urgent care settings, either full-time or part-time, as part of market research initiatives. Initially, much of this work emerged in the context of COVID testing, treatment, and vaccination research. But the trend has broadened considerably.
Today, urgent care providers are increasingly relevant in marketing research across an array of therapeutic areas: respiratory disease, vaccines, infectious disease, dermatology, women’s health, gastrointestinal conditions, as well as broader patient journey or buying process work.
The reason is straightforward: in many therapeutic areas and for a growing segment of the population, particularly young people, urgent care has evolved into a mainstream entry point into the healthcare system.
Recent CDC data underscore how embedded urgent care has become in American healthcare utilization patterns. Approximately 28% of Americans had at least one urgent care visit in 2024. Usage is especially high among children and adults under age 65.
That trend aligns with broader shifts in patient behavior, particularly among younger consumers.
Many patients today prioritize speed, accessibility, extended hours, digital scheduling, and immediate care availability. In many markets, especially in cities and affluent suburbs, people can book an urgent care appointment online in minutes and be seen the same day. By contrast, obtaining a sick visit with a primary care physician may take days or even weeks.
The growing shortage of primary care physicians is accelerating this shift.
A recent Medscape article described younger patients increasingly abandoning traditional primary care for acute needs because of long wait times and limited appointment availability. One patient interviewed described urgent care as having effectively “become my primary care.”
That statement would have sounded unusual several years ago. Today, it is not surprising and reflects a growing reality.
The issue is not that patients no longer value longitudinal care relationships. Most still do. But healthcare behavior is adapting to the operational realities of the system. For many patients, younger adults especially, urgent care has become the practical solution for episodic health needs.
That matters enormously for pharmaceutical companies trying to understand the modern patient journey and how treatment decisions are actually being made.
Urgent care providers often encounter patients at a very specific moment: when symptoms are active, decisions are immediate, and expectations for action are high. As we've seen in our research, the clinical dynamic is different from traditional office-based medicine.
HCPs in urgent care settings are frequently making treatment, testing, vaccination, or referral decisions under significant time pressure, often without long-standing relationships with patients and sometimes without access to complete medical histories. Patients, meanwhile, are often anxious, uncomfortable, and seeking fast resolution.
In our 1:1 marketing research interviews, urgent care HCPs often describe a care context that is defined by throughput, convenience, operational efficiency, and patient expectations around immediacy. Like a pit crew in a NASCAR race.
That creates a distinct decision-making environment, one that pharmaceutical marketers and Insights & Analytics (I&A) teams increasingly need to understand.
For example, in categories involving respiratory symptoms, flu, COVID, RSV, urinary conditions, skin infections, or minor acute presentations, urgent care may represent one of the earliest and most commercially important points of interaction. It may be where testing occurs, where treatment is initiated, where vaccines are recommended, or where patients are referred into the broader healthcare system.
Those interactions also have the potential to meaningfully shape downstream brand utilization and patient behavior.
Including urgent care HCPs in research is not simply about expanding sample diversity. It is also about understanding how site of care influences clinical behavior, operational decision-making, and patient flow.
Urgent care clinicians often operate within systems that look very different from traditional physician offices. Some centers are independently owned. Others are health-system affiliated, retail connected, or backed by private equity investment. Workflow expectations, staffing models, testing capabilities, formulary decisions, and operational protocols can vary significantly across organizations.
These operational realities influence how care is delivered.
In qualitative interviews, urgent care providers frequently discuss issues that traditional office-based HCPs may underrepresent: patient throughput pressures, diagnostic speed, reimbursement complexity, staffing limitations, protocol standardization, vaccine inventory management, and the challenge of balancing evidence-based care with patient expectations for immediate gratification.
Even antibiotic stewardship conversations take on a different texture in urgent care. Research has shown higher rates of unnecessary antibiotic prescribing in some urgent care settings compared with other outpatient environments, highlighting how convenience-driven care models can shape prescribing behavior and patient expectations.
For pharma companies, those contextual factors are commercially relevant. They influence adoption, messaging, education, access, and real-world utilization.
Not every therapeutic area requires urgent care inclusion. But many more do than even a few years ago. Commercial and I&A teams should increasingly ask several important questions during study design:
The answers may materially affect segmentation, patient journey mapping, message development, and GTM strategy.
Healthcare delivery is becoming more decentralized, consumerized, and episodic. Urgent care sits directly at the center of that shift.
For pharma commercial teams, the implication is becoming difficult to ignore: if urgent care is increasingly where patients show up, it also needs to be where market understanding begins.
