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.