Tailor Marketing to a tightening Economy! Urgent tips for hurting Walk-in Facilites.

Up the Ante on your Stimulus Marketing!

"$55 Doctor Visits Offered to the Unemployed!","Health Stimulus Plan", just a couple million dollar catchphrases found in a recent Reliant Immediate Care press release. The LA-based urgent care facility has keenly observed that a great location can't be the only engine driving their marketing. Although they are located within minutes of the LAX airport, Dr. Lebow, Medical Director of Reliant Immediate Care knows the value of "upping the ante" on the marketing, especially during hard financial times for patients. They are utilizing FindUrgentcare to post special promotions in addition to the online press release to distinguish themselves as the walk-in facility for all types of patients and with varying financial circumstances. This is a prime example of creativity and great timing, as well as an exceptional demonstration of compassion and care for the community.

If your facility is offering specials to cash-paying or unemployed patients, tell them so! Get the word out in all of your marketing and update it on your FindUrgentCare webpage. You may very well be allowing the breadwinner of the family to return to the workforce, or treating a patient who otherwise would have neglected much needed care due to cost. Not only is it great marketing to spread the word, but it's a service to the community!

Great job Reliant Immediate Care, we hope you don't mind if a few clinics follow your lead =)

How many Urgent Care centers are there? Count with me!

I get asked this question all the time. The great thing is, now I don't have to feel silly when I say "I don't know!". The Urgent Care Association of America and The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine put together a survey, conducted extensive research on the topic- consulting every database in existence, and came up with the answer..."we don't know!" That is not to say there were no findings...read on.

The problem exists in the definition of Urgent Care- whether to include retail clinics (those located inside a retail store), hospital based-urgent care centers (sometimes labeled "urgent care" but in reality simply a fast-track located within the ED), Primary Care Centers that allow walk-ins but do not have extended hours. Centers like these that fall outside of the definition of urgent care were not indluded, but others that fell more in the gray area were what made it so difficult to count. There are centers that should legitimately be qualified as urgent care centers but are nowhere on the web or any registry. Simply put, the number was difficult to find, and admittedly incomplete, but the number of identifiable urgent care centers was found to be....drum roll please...roughly 8,000 urgent care centers nationwide- much less than the initial estimate of 12,000. The moral of the story? Promote your practice and you will be paving the way for research and education for the entire industry! For more info on the issue, check out the January 2009 issue of JUCM.

Happy Thanksgiving from FindUrgentCare!

We Have a Winner for the FindUrgentCare iPod Drawing!!

Click here to support the cause!<-----------



Congratz to Pat Alvarez of Sendas Northwest Urgent Care for winning the drawing for a brand new (red) iPod shuffle! A part of the proceeds of every (red) iPod shuffle are donated to the Global fund to help eliminate HIV in Africa.
Pat stopped by the FindUrgentCare booth at the UCAOA Conference in Memphis last week. Thanks for saying hi Pat! Enjoy!

Walkin in Memphis! Marketing Tidbits and Highlights from the 2008 UCAOA Fall Conference.

The Fall 2008 UCAOA Conference went great! It's a great chance for physicians to earn CME's as well as professionals in the Urgent Care industry to come together and learn from each other...and we manage to have some fun while we're at it!

I went to a great Marketing lecture by Sam Yates of Yates & Associates that touched on the importance of a strong web presence via Search Engine Optimization (SEO)- or boosting your website's ranking in searches targeted toward your desired audience. I was not surprised that not many in the audience were familiar with SEO, or even had a website. He threw out a couple compelling statistics- 75% of college students and young adults use the internet for their first stop for health care information... and did you know that 62% of buying decisions are made from web-based research? Maybe we should consider our web-exposure when trying to reach emerging generations as well as a very integral part of our target market...those who want to buy! Thanks Sam for a great lecture- I didn't even attempt to cover all of the great tips you included.

We also had a great time seeing some of our favorite exhibitors, meeting new clients as well as greeting others face to face that we've built relationships over the phone. We were happy to introduce our partnerships with Pharmalink and VaxServe of Sanofi Pasteur as exceptional vendors to the urgent care community. We met other potential partners and spoke with prospective clients about discounts offered to them on products and services through the FindUrgentCare Vendor Network. Thanks Becky and everyone at the UCAOA and John at PME Expo services for such a great conference!

Other Highlights: Walking down Beale street and hearing some great blues. Street acrobats and even acrobats in bars. The ducks in the Memphis Peabody Hotel that March down from the elevator and across the red carpet to play in the fountain. Experiencing some down home barbeque- just about every meal except for breakfast over the course of 3 days. Bread pudding. The sunset view from the top of the Memphis Peabody. Spotting Priscilla Presley. Touring Graceland.

Elvis lives!- Graceland Tour.---->


Amy and Elvis (left) at the Urgent Care America/ UCAOA party on top of the Peabody- just in time for the sunset.

Go Green or Go Home!! Great health tips and advice for becoming eco-friendly

I am one of those people you see in the local market scanning the labels on my groceries for those ugly more-than-four-letter-words like "hydrogenated oil", "yellow #8909793838295...etc.","high fructose corn syrup"... and those sneaky words that end in "ose" or "itol" that basically mean SUGAR! I find pleasure from decoding tricky marketing tactics like "no trans fat per serving"- which basically means that in terms of one serving, there is a low enough content for the FDA to allow them to use that label.

Want to be more informed about the benefits of going organic and see what's up with all the hype surrounding "going green"? I found a great blog by a company called Earthpure Organics. Browse topics that discuss which fats are good fats, or find out the benefits of being one of those people who carries the cloth bags into the grocery store...besides the fact that it's sort of hip right now, anyway you catch my drift. If you're into learning more about the subject, check out this blog: http://nextgenvending.blogspot.com/. Enjoy!

The age of the Email Healthcare...and scares: can your iphone make your popcorn pop?

Some of you might have been similarly fooled by a certain email that is circulating. It's about cell phones having the ability to pop popcorn...and thus, possibly taking a similar toll on your brain while you use them...or maybe you were not fooled...and you're laughing right now. Regardless, check out the video that has convinced many to keep perpetuating this spoof by forwarding it all their bff's and even work-colleagues.

The "YouTube" quality clip documents three different groups of people arranging their cell phones around a few raw kernels and after simultaneously calling each phone, the result is popped corn! Well I have to admit, it had me and a few co-workers intrigued enough to try it ourselves after it had been forwarded to us. Sure enough, we set up the experiment with all of its constants, and after calling all three cell-phones at the same time, each of us reached the voicemail without the birth of a single crunchy morsel. A website called snopes.com has an article that also validated our results with the popcorn; in addition to this, it debunks a rumor that had previously circulated about cell phones poaching an egg. We were disappointed that the email had fooled so many...and that this meant our cell phones wouldn't be cooking dinner for us anytime soon...but very relieved that our brains were not currently being subjected to the same electromagnetic activity powered in that one-minute pop setting on a microwave! Most young professionals, myself included, don't even own a house phone because we would never be home enough to use it. This would mean some serious pop-corn brains for us!

I do not mean to discount any claim that cell-phone usage may pose a long-term danger to our health, consumers should be compelled to wonder whether pointing radio waves at our heads from satellites in the sky has an effect on our health. But this absurdly lame spoof, that's easy to debunk with a few cell phones and minutes of your time, did get me thinking about how much credibility our society gives these forwarded emails we constantly circulate. It also made me sad that there really are people out there who actually spend their time constructing spoof videos to generate false claims to fool the masses. What other health advice have we taken from gmail or MyYahoo? I'm going to practice what I preach and take a second look before I "forward".