Urgent Care Answers From Stern's Inbox

My e-mail inbox receives frequent e-mail questions about the business of urgent care. I thought that readers might benefit from a few of my recent replies.

Q: Do you have any idea if urgent care centers are experiencing a decline in revenue over the last few months (especially in December and January)?

—Andrew Heyman, Selz Capital, LLC, New York, N.Y.

A: This is the great question that many potential investors are asking about urgent care (“Is urgent care resistant to recessions?”). Indeed, urgent care has historically been remarkably recession proof. The reason for this is simple, in that people generally don’t go to urgent care centers for elective issues; members of the public use urgent care centers for issues they don’t feel can wait for an appointment with their primary care physician.

Having worked in this industry for over 20 years as a physician, practice owner, consultant and software solution provider, I have seen recessions come and go, but over the years the urgent care industry has experienced steady growth—growth that has been fairly independent of market cycles.

Objectors to this view may point out that this recession is not simply a cyclical downturn, and some analysts predict that unemployment (producing uninsured workers) may soon top 10 percent. While this is true, one must not forget the converse statistic: even at 10 percent unemployment, the employment rate will still be at 90 percent. In addition, unemployment often runs at 5 percent, even in relatively good times.

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