Urgent care patient experience: speed, clarity, and control

It’s 7:30 p.m. on a Wednesday, and a parent is on hold with their local urgent care, trying to find out if the clinic can see their sick child before it closes. When someone finally picks up, the parent repeats the same information and insurance details they already gave their pediatrician’s office earlier that day. At the clinic, they fill out a paper form, unsure whether the information will make it to the provider. They don’t know what happens next or how long the wait will be.

None of this involves a clinician. But, according to the NIH National Library of Medicine article, Emergency Patient Experience¹,  all of these factors shape how that parent feels about the visit.

At urgent care clinics, patients arrive without an appointment history, often stressed, and expecting solutions in a hurry. Their experience is made up of three components, and only one of them happens in the exam room:

• Clinical time: how quickly the patient is seen and treated
• Administrative friction: the effort required to schedule, register, check in, and communicate about the visit
• Uncertainty: not knowing what to do, where to go, or when to expect a response

Clinical speed matters, but it isn’t the whole story. A patient can be treated efficiently by a provider and still leave frustrated because of long hold times, duplicate forms, or poor communication about wait times. And keeping patients informed during delays is one of the strongest factors associated with patient satisfaction.²

Can digital tools help? Yes, but the goal isn’t to simply add more technology just because it exists. The goal is to reduce friction and uncertainty across the parts of the visit that don’t involve a clinician by connecting routine patient interactions with existing staff workflows. In that scenario, it’s a win-win for both patient and provider.

Make scheduling and appointment access easier

A patient starts forming an opinion about their urgent care visit before they arrive at the clinic. Finding an appointment—and how much effort that takes—colors their impression. Phone-only scheduling creates a bottleneck on both sides. Patients wait on hold, often when staff are also busy managing walk-ins and clinical questions. Staff, in turn, spend time on repetitive calls that pull attention from more involved tasks.

Self-service scheduling is designed to shift that dynamic. Patients may get faster access to available slots, more control over choosing a time that works for them, and the ability to book outside of traditional office hours, a big need for working parents. Clinic staff gets reduced call volume and administrative work. And it seems, patients are embracing the technology—among people who used their patient portals in 2024, 79% used them to message providers and 77% used them to schedule appointments³.

Digital patient engagement tools include online self-scheduling and appointment management, which allow patients to find and book available visits without waiting for a live person to answer the phone. This shifts scheduling out of the call queue, giving staff more time for calls that require judgment or clinical input and giving patients a faster path to an appointment.

Use AI-powered waitlist scheduling to respond to cancellations

Urgent care volume is unpredictable, and cancellations open gaps that are easy to miss if staff are focused elsewhere. This is one area where agentic AI—AI that can complete a defined task on behalf of a patient or staff member within set guidelines—has a clear, practical application.

Here’s what that looks like in practice: when a cancellation opens an appointment slot, AI-powered waitlist scheduling can identify patients who are eligible for that opening and proactively notify them, without a staff member needing to manually work down a list.

It’s important to note that there are some things this technology can’t do. AI-powered waitlist scheduling can’t fill every cancellation. Some slots will still go unfilled depending on timing and patient availability. It doesn’t make clinical judgments about urgency; those calls still belong to clinical staff. And it’s by no means a guarantee of increased revenue or patient satisfaction.

What it can do is reduce the manual effort involved in managing a waitlist and shorten time-to-care for the patients who are matched to a newly available slot. That’s a meaningful benefit. Not a wholesale transformation of clinic operations, but a reduction in one specific source of friction.

Reducing check-in friction

After an appointment is set, here comes the next potential pain point for both patient and provider: registration.

Enhanced Self Check-In (ESCI), a digital patient engagement tool integrated within athenaOne®, lets patients complete registration tasks before they arrive, which smooths the way to being seen faster.

Through ESCI, patients can review and update their information, complete forms and consent, provide insurance details, and handle payment steps, all before a staff member needs to intervene. Because these submissions flow into athenaOne for Urgent Care as structured data, staff aren’t left transcribing handwriting from a clipboard into the system after the fact.

This system also benefits patients that don’t have a smartphone or aren’t comfortable with digital tools. Staff-initiated check-in and practice-owned devices, like a tablet at the front desk, extend the same streamlined process.  

The benefits are designed to compound in ways that go beyond convenience. Patients may spend less time re-entering information they’ve provided elsewhere. Staff see fewer transcription errors and get a clearer picture of who’s arriving before their appointment. Front-desk lines can move faster when fewer patients need a staff member to walk them through a paper form line by line.

Self-service check-in expands when patients can do it on their own. But it doesn’t replace staff-assisted registration. Patients who prefer or need help from a person can still get it.

Move from one-way reminders to bidirectional communication  

Most patients are familiar with automated appointment reminders: a text confirming a time, a follow-up nudge the day before. That’s useful, but it’s one-directional. It doesn’t give a patient anywhere to ask a question.

In urgent care, the most common questions are logistical and time-sensitive: What are your hours today? What should I bring? Can I reschedule for later this afternoon? Patients also want confirmation that their message or request was received.

Patient Conversations in athenaOne addresses this gap with AI-supported two-way texting and secure chat that spans the patient journey, from scheduling through check-in and beyond. It can answer routine questions directly, freeing up phone lines and front-desk staff for more specific inquiries, route more complex requests to the right team, and escalate to a staff member when necessary.

The detail that matters most here is continuity. When a conversation escalates from an automated system to a staff member, the patient shouldn’t have to repeat what they’ve already said. Carrying that context forward is what makes two-way communication feel coherent rather than bouncing between disconnected systems.

Design AI tools around the realities of urgent care operations

For clinical operations leaders evaluating patient engagement technology, the details of implementation matter as much as the capabilities themselves. Here are a few essential to-dos:

• Prioritize mobile-friendly options. Most patients will interact with scheduling, check-in, and messaging tools from a phone, often while caring for a sick family member or feeling unwell themselves.
• Reduce disconnected portals, forms, and calls. Tools that don’t talk to each other relocate friction rather than removing it.
• Integrate with existing staff workflows. Technology that requires staff to check a separate system adds work.
• Preserve a path to human help. Self-service should be an option, not a requirement. Some patients will always prefer a person.
• Account for language, accessibility, digital literacy, and device access. Not every patient arrives with the same comfort level or resources.
• Avoid tools that simply shift work behind the scenes. If a self-service tool creates a new manual task for staff to clean up afterward, it hasn’t reduced friction—it’s just moved it.
• Evaluate the entire patient journey. A tool that improves scheduling but leaves out check-in or communication only solves part of the problem.

Speed, clarity, and control

A strong urgent care experience doesn’t depend solely on how quickly a patient moves through the exam room. It also depends on whether the organization removes avoidable administrative delays, communicates clearly at each step, and gives patients convenient ways to complete the routine tasks that surround a visit, including scheduling, registration, check-in, and getting answers to questions.

athenaOne for Urgent Care brings tailored EHR, revenue cycle management, and patient engagement capabilities together to support the patient’s full journey, from finding a location through making payment. When scheduling, intake, check-in, and communication work together instead of as disconnected steps, patients may get the speed, clarity, and control they’re looking for, and staff spend less time on repetitive administrative work.

Explore connected self-service and AI-supported tools designed to make patient access and communication easier while reducing staff workload.