Thought Leadership

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UCP Merchant Medicine — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:55:51 GMT

Urgent care has spent the last decade proving it can handle more than sprained ankles and strep throat. The next frontier is diagnostic capability — and new peer-reviewed research suggests one tool in particular deserves a serious second look: point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS).

A study published in the Journal of Urgent Care Medicine, co-authored by Joshua Russell, MD, UCPMM's Chief Medical Officer, along with John Weissert and Tatiana Havryliuk, MD, set out to answer two practical questions every urgent care operator cares about: how often would POCUS actually be useful in a typical adult visit, and could a center realistically afford to offer it?

The team used Intellivisit — UCPMM's AI-powered clinical intake platform — and 10,000 real, de-identified adult urgent care encounters from centers across four states to build and test an algorithm that flagged which patients would clinically benefit from a POCUS exam. The algorithm's calls were then checked against the judgment of expert physicians, who agreed with it 94% of the time, a level of agreement statisticians consider "near perfect."

Here's the headline finding: 9.2% of adult visits — roughly 1 in 11 — had at least one condition where POCUS would have added real diagnostic value. Lung and chest complaints made up the overwhelming share of those cases, nearly 8 in 10, which lines up with exactly what urgent care sees walking through the door every day: cough, shortness of breath, possible pneumonia. Prior research has shown lung ultrasound to be as accurate as, and sometimes better than, a chest X-ray for these conditions, and it delivers an answer in the room, in minutes, without waiting on a radiology tech who may not even be on-site.

The remaining cases — abscess, kidney stones, gallbladder concerns, suspected blood clots — made up a smaller share individually, but each represents a moment where a clinician could confirm a diagnosis on the spot instead of sending a patient elsewhere for imaging or guessing.

Then comes the part that tends to make operators sit up: the money. The study modeled a straightforward fee-for-service billing scenario and found that ultrasound reimbursement alone could put a larger urgent care organization at break-even in roughly 10 months, and even a single independent clinic in a little over two years. For an operator running dozens of centers, the math gets better fast — the study estimated ongoing annual costs as low as $6,000 per clinic at scale, for a tool that generates both better diagnoses and real revenue.

That combination — clinical relevance plus a believable path to financial viability — is exactly the bar any new capability needs to clear before it belongs in front of frontline clinicians. It's not enough for a tool to be "nice to have." It has to reliably improve outcomes for real patients while pulling its own weight financially. This research suggests POCUS clears that bar for the average urgent care center.

This is precisely the kind of question UCPMM exists to help health systems answer. Building a modern urgent care network isn't just about opening more doors. It's about deciding, with evidence rather than guesswork, which clinical capabilities actually move the needle for patients and for the bottom line. Every diagnostic tool, staffing decision, and workflow choice either strengthens or dilutes the promise of urgent care: fast, trustworthy, affordable answers close to home.

Health systems that partner with UCPMM get access to exactly this kind of data-driven decision-making. The same Intellivisit intelligence platform behind this study also powers day-to-day clinical workflows inside UCPMM-designed urgent care centers, helping identify which patients need what, in real time, at the point of care. That's the difference between an urgent care center that simply absorbs volume and one that's engineered to be high-performing — fast door-to-door times, strong patient satisfaction scores, and service lines that pay for themselves.

POCUS won't be the right fit for every center on day one. Training, credentialing, and patient volume all matter, as the study's own authors note. But for health systems asking "what's next" for their urgent care strategy, this research offers something rare: real numbers, drawn from real patients, pointing toward a technology that's affordable, clinically justified, and increasingly expected by patients who've already seen it used elsewhere in their care.

The bigger lesson for hospital and health system leaders is this: modern urgent care isn't static. The centers that will lead the next decade are the ones willing to ask hard questions about what belongs in the exam room, and back up the answer with data instead of tradition. That evidence-first standard is what UCPMM builds toward with every health system partner.

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UCP Merchant Medicine — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:55:33 GMT

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UCP Merchant Medicine — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:55:18 GMT

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UCP Merchant Medicine — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:55:04 GMT

Urgent care has spent the last decade proving it can handle more than sprained ankles
and strep throat. The next frontier is diagnostic capability — and new peer-reviewed
research suggests one tool in particular deserves a serious second look: point-of-care
ultrasound (POCUS).

A study published in the Journal of Urgent Care Medicine, co-authored by Joshua
Russell, MD, UCPMM's Chief Medical Officer, along with John Weissert and Tatiana
Havryliuk, MD, set out to answer two practical questions every urgent care operator
cares about: how often would POCUS actually be useful in a typical adult visit, and
could a center realistically afford to offer it?

The team used Intellivisit — UCPMM's AI-powered clinical intake platform — and
10,000 real, de-identified adult urgent care encounters from centers across four states
to build and test an algorithm that flagged which patients would clinically benefit from a
POCUS exam. The algorithm's calls were then checked against the judgment of expert
physicians, who agreed with it 94% of the time, a level of agreement statisticians
consider "near perfect."

Here's the headline finding: 9.2% of adult visits — roughly 1 in 11 — had at least one
condition where POCUS would have added real diagnostic value. Lung and chest
complaints made up the overwhelming share of those cases, nearly 8 in 10, which lines
up with exactly what urgent care sees walking through the door every day: cough,
shortness of breath, possible pneumonia. Prior research has shown lung ultrasound to
be as accurate as, and sometimes better than, a chest X-ray for these conditions, and it
delivers an answer in the room, in minutes, without waiting on a radiology tech who may
not even be on-site.

The remaining cases — abscess, kidney stones, gallbladder concerns, suspected blood
clots — made up a smaller share individually, but each represents a moment where a
clinician could confirm a diagnosis on the spot instead of sending a patient elsewhere
for imaging or guessing.

Then comes the part that tends to make operators sit up: the money. The study
modeled a straightforward fee-for-service billing scenario and found that ultrasound
reimbursement alone could put a larger urgent care organization at break-even in roughly 10 months, and even a single independent clinic in a little over two years. For
an operator running dozens of centers, the math gets better fast — the study estimated
ongoing annual costs as low as $6,000 per clinic at scale, for a tool that generates both
better diagnoses and real revenue.

That combination — clinical relevance plus a believable path to financial viability — is
exactly the bar any new capability needs to clear before it belongs in front of frontline
clinicians. It's not enough for a tool to be "nice to have." It has to reliably improve
outcomes for real patients while pulling its own weight financially. This research
suggests POCUS clears that bar for the average urgent care center.

This is precisely the kind of question UCPMM exists to help health systems answer.
Building a modern urgent care network isn't just about opening more doors. It's about
deciding, with evidence rather than guesswork, which clinical capabilities actually move
the needle for patients and for the bottom line. Every diagnostic tool, staffing decision,
and workflow choice either strengthens or dilutes the promise of urgent care: fast,
trustworthy, affordable answers close to home.

Health systems that partner with UCPMM get access to exactly this kind of data-driven
decision-making. The same Intellivisit intelligence platform behind this study also
powers day-to-day clinical workflows inside UCPMM-designed urgent care centers,
helping identify which patients need what, in real time, at the point of care. That's the
difference between an urgent care center that simply absorbs volume and one that's
engineered to be high-performing — fast door-to-door times, strong patient satisfaction
scores, and service lines that pay for themselves.

POCUS won't be the right fit for every center on day one. Training, credentialing, and
patient volume all matter, as the study's own authors note. But for health systems
asking "what's next" for their urgent care strategy, this research offers something rare:
real numbers, drawn from real patients, pointing toward a technology that's affordable,
clinically justified, and increasingly expected by patients who've already seen it used
elsewhere in their care.

The bigger lesson for hospital and health system leaders is this: modern urgent care
isn't static. The centers that will lead the next decade are the ones willing to ask hard
questions about what belongs in the exam room, and back up the answer with data
instead of tradition. That evidence-first standard is what UCPMM builds toward with
every health system partner.

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UCP Merchant Medicine — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:54:49 GMT

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UCP Merchant Medicine — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:54:34 GMT

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UCP Merchant Medicine — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:54:14 GMT

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UCP Merchant Medicine — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:53:52 GMT

Ear Pain Is a Top Urgent Care Complaint. New Research Shows a Simple Tool Could Fix How It's Diagnosed.

UCP Merchant Medicine — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:51:13 GMT

Ask any urgent care clinician about their most common — and most frustrating — diagnostic guessing game, and ear pain comes up fast. Is it a true infection? Fluid behind the eardrum with no infection at all? Something unrelated, like jaw dysfunction, masquerading as an ear problem? The standard tool, a basic otoscope, often can't reliably tell the difference. New peer-reviewed research suggests there's a better answer, and it's a simple, handheld device many urgent care centers haven't yet added to the room: tympanometry.

The study, published in the Journal of Urgent Care Medicine and co-authored by Joshua Russell, MD, Chief Medical Officer at UCP Merchant Medicine (UCPMM), along with Jeff Lacour, MD, John Weissert, Dan Frankowski, and Demetrio Aguila III, MD, tackled a problem that's been hiding in plain sight: tympanometry is backed by clear guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Otolaryngology, yet almost no urgent care centers offer it.

Why does that matter? Plain otoscopy, simply looking into the ear with a light, misses middle ear fluid in a meaningful share of cases. That's a real problem, because national guidelines require confirmed fluid behind the eardrum before a clinician can even diagnose acute otitis media. Without that confirmation, some patients receive antibiotics they don't need. Others, especially adults whose ear pain actually stems from jaw joint problems, get treated for an ear infection they never had. On the more serious end, patients with sudden hearing loss depend on quickly distinguishing a treatable, fluid- related cause from a true inner-ear emergency, and tympanometry is often the tool that makes that distinction clear in seconds rather than after a delayed specialist referral.

As Dr. Russell put it when the findings were announced, "Let's be honest about otoscopy. A clinician looks in your ear and makes a call. However rigorous this may feel, it's about as accurate as flipping a coin at detecting fluid behind the ear drum. We know that most kids and virtually all adults with acute ear pain don't need antibiotics. Moreover, clinicians using an otoscope, even ENTs, aren't great at identifying the patients who would benefit from taking antibiotics."

The research team trained a statistical model on nearly 141,000 real, de-identified urgent care visits collected through Intellivisit, UCPMM's AI-powered clinical intake platform, then tested its predictions against the judgment of two board-certified ear, nose, and throat specialists. The model and the specialists agreed with each other at a near-perfect rate. When the researchers then applied the model to a fresh sample of 10,000 typical urgent care visits, it flagged 18.2%, nearly 1 in 5, as cases where tympanometry would add real diagnostic value. Ear pain and suspected ear infections, it turns out, are common enough in urgent care to matter on their own as a service line. Scaled to the roughly 185 million urgent care visits that happen across the U.S. each year, that 18% translates to more than 36 million patients who could stand to benefit from wider tympanometry adoption.

Dr. Russell sees tympanometry's simplicity as the real unlock. "It's the obvious best choice for evaluating ear complaints in adults and children. It's cheap, it's fast, and you don't need to be an ENT, or even a clinician, to use it," he said in the study's release. "In most states a nurse, audiologist, or medical assistant can run the test. That's the beauty of it — it standardizes an evaluation that was previously among the most subjective things that doctors did for patients."

Then there's the financial case, and it's a strong one. A tympanometer costs roughly $4,700 upfront, training included. At an average reimbursement of $22 per exam, the study calculated that a typical urgent care center would break even after just 214 exams, a threshold most centers would clear in about a month based on typical visit volumes. After that point, the model projected close to $4,900 in additional monthly revenue, recurring indefinitely, from a single, simple device that fits in one hand.

Put those two findings together and the takeaway is straightforward: tympanometry is a low-cost, minimally disruptive addition that improves diagnostic accuracy on one of urgent care's most frequent complaints, pays for itself almost immediately, and requires a fraction of the training burden of many other clinical tools. As Dr. Russell said, "People come to urgent care all the time because their ears hurt. Clinicians using outdated equipment substantiate the myth that antibiotics make sense for most cases of ear pain. In actuality, the opposite is true... Tympanometry offers an off ramp from this state of normalcy that we've accepted for too long."

The authors are careful to note this is a first step rather than a finish line. Lead author Dr. Jeff Lacour, a board-certified otolaryngologist, noted that "the study modeled where tympanometry would help and whether it would reimburse," and that a forthcoming study will examine tympanometry's effect on antibiotic prescribing directly. Early results, he said, show that "using a better diagnostic tool led to fewer inappropriate antibiotics." Dr. Russell expects momentum to build from here: "This study was step one, a proof-of- concept, but we are already seeing urgent care operators persuaded by the data... I believe in the next few years we will see rapid adoption and demands for tympanometry in urgent care, both from clinicians and patients."

That's exactly the kind of opportunity UCPMM is built to help health systems find and act on. A Modern Urgent Care network isn't defined by how many locations it has. It's defined by whether every visit ends with the right diagnosis, delivered efficiently, at a cost that supports the business over the long term. Getting there requires constantly re- evaluating what belongs in the room, not out of habit, but based on where the data actually points. (Read the full announcement of the study's findings here.)

Health systems partnering with UCPMM benefit from exactly this kind of evidence-first approach. It's grounded in the same Intellivisit clinical intelligence platform used to build this research, which also drives smarter intake and clinical decision support inside UCPMM-designed urgent care centers every day. That's how Modern Urgent Care networks stay clinically sharp, operationally lean, and consistently trusted by the patients who walk through the door, whether that patient is a toddler with an ear pulling at night or an adult worried about sudden hearing loss.

For hospital and health system leaders mapping out their urgent care strategy, this study is a reminder that some of the highest-value moves aren't expensive or complicated. Sometimes they're a single, affordable device paired with the discipline to use data to decide who actually needs it. That discipline, pairing clinical evidence with financial reality, is at the heart of what UCPMM helps health systems build.

From 3 Centers to 16 in 20 Months: How INTEGRIS Health Scaled Urgent Care Without Sacrificing Speed or Experience

UCP Merchant Medicine — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:41:05 GMT

Growing an urgent care network fast usually means picking two out of three: speed, quality, or margin. INTEGRIS Health, the Oklahoma City-based health system, wanted all three. In just 20 months, its AllSet Urgent Care network grew from 3 locations to 16, cut average door-to-door time nearly in half, and landed in the top decile nationally for patient experience — all while bringing convenient care within a 15-minute drive for 83% of the metro. The engagement, powered by UCP Merchant Medicine (UCPMM) and its Intellivisit AI platform, is a case study in what's possible when operational discipline and clinical AI scale together instead of competing for resources.

The starting problem will sound familiar to any health system leader who has tried to expand ambulatory access. INTEGRIS faced coverage gaps across a large metro footprint, front-line variation in how patients were interviewed, triaged, and documented, door-to-door times that frustrated patients and capped volume, and the perennial tension between growing fast and protecting margin. The conventional urgent care playbook — hire ahead of demand, lean on individual clinician judgment, standardize later if at all — tends to make each of those problems worse as a network scales, not better.

UCPMM's approach was built around a different premise: don't treat growth and consistency as trade-offs. The engagement followed a three-phase model — Strategy, Execution, and Operating System — that UCPMM describes less as a project and more as a partnership. Phase one covered market analysis, financial modeling, site selection, and clinical design, the foundation for every site that followed. Phase two put UCPMM's team on the ground alongside INTEGRIS to build operations, hire and train staff, and deploy Intellivisit at each new location. Phase three kept Intellivisit always-on as the network's operating system, pairing it with ongoing benchmarking and continuous improvement so that quality didn't erode as the site count climbed.

That last point is the one worth sitting with. Scaling from 3 sites to 16 is the kind of growth that typically introduces variation — different staff, different habits, different shortcuts under pressure. Intellivisit's role, structuring every patient interview and giving front-line staff real-time, decision-ready guidance, is what enabled INTEGRIS to maintain quality across all 16 locations as they scaled. The platform is built on Lucent, a white-box AI engine trained on more than 10 million patient-years, 40,000-plus symptoms, and 4,000-plus diagnoses, and it shows its reasoning rather than operating as a black box, which matters when clinicians need to trust — and act on — what the system recommends.

The results speak for themselves.

Average door-to-door time dropped from 61 minutes to 30.
Net Promoter Score reached the top decile nationally, and stayed there consistently rather than spiking once and fading.

As INTEGRIS Health CEO Tim Pehrson put it, "In just 20 months, we grew from 3 average urgent care centers to 16 world-class INTEGRIS Health AllSet locations, within a 15-minute drive for over 83% of the Oklahoma City metro. We cut average door-to- door times from 61 minutes to 30 and increased Net Promoter Score, consistently performing in the top decile nationally."

This is what Modern Urgent Care looks like in practice: not just more locations, but a network where every visit, at every site, follows the same evidence-based standard regardless of who's staffing the front desk that day. It's the same discipline UCPMM has now brought to more than 300 urgent care and rapid-access sites across 75-plus health systems since 2015.

If you're mapping out what urgent care expansion could look like in your own market, INTEGRIS's numbers are a useful benchmark, not a ceiling. Schedule a conversation with UCPMM to scope what's possible, and what it would take to get there.