To say that this urgent care practice based in New York City has grown rapidly is an understatement. From an initial four practices in 2010 to more than 169 in 2024, the company has followed a unique growth path. What’s the secret to their success? The answer lies in their consumer-centric philosophy…with some help from analytics.
The urgent care organization’s approach
This organization was founded by a group of ER physicians focused on two things: offering an exceptional patient experience and allowing doctors to practice medicine effectively and efficiently.
“We started a practice with the philosophy that patient care can be done better,” explained their co-founder and former chief growth officer.
The organization believes a key to improving the patient experience is embracing consumerism. As the co-founder explained, becoming a consumer-centric retail healthcare brand means that you must, “build around the customer, not around your ideas of how you want to practice medicine or deliver care. Where does the customer live? How is he or she going to interact with your brand or service?”
Audiense’s solution
Buxton, now known as Audiense In-Person, developed patient profiles to help the urgent care organization better understand who their patients are as consumers and where current and potential patients are located. Audiense also developed a site selection model and used it to conduct a potential analysis to identify the organization’s best growth opportunities. The profile, model and analysis results were deployed to SCOUT, a geospatial application in the Audiense In-Person platform, so the organization could analyze markets on demand.
“Today, we have a platform that allows us to not only search, which is interesting, but also validate,” remarked the co-founder. “There are certain markets that we know, or feel we know, are the right markets, and we can use the tool today to really go with confidence to our steering committees and our boards and say, ‘This is our growth strategy. This is our plan. And here’s the data to support it.’ Audiense is an integral part of validating and supporting that.”
Another important benefit of the Audiense In-Person solution is the ability to glean insights from internal datasets.
“Our organization, as a healthcare company, has a plethora of data that is really difficult to sort through. What matters? What doesn’t matter? Audiense as a partner was instrumental in helping us not only sort through our internal data, but also bringing us external data points to help both validate some of our assumptions and discover new ones that we weren’t fully aware of,” noted the co-founder.
Results
Using Audiense’s site selection model and potential analysis has yielded strong results. Early in the partnership, Audiense conducted an analysis to validate the model's performance. Audiense assessed the annual visits volume of an initial 30 clinics that opened since the beginning of the partnership, had at least 12 months of performance history, and are in markets that were part of the initial model build. Of these 30 clinics, the urgent care organization placed 26 in Audiense recommended trade areas.
The average unit volume (AUV) for the 26 clinics was nearly two times higher than the AUV of locations placed outside recommended trade areas. Furthermore, by comparing anticipated performance if all units had been opened using the site selection model to anticipated performance if no units had used a site selection model, Audiense found that using analytics would lead to sites with a more than 7% higher visits volume.
Customer support
The urgent care organization appreciates both the services and the staff at Audiense. As a people-first brand, the organization looks for great people in their vendors, too, and has been impressed with their Audiense In-Person support team. Audiense In-Person’s combination of consultative support and analytics makes it a unique option for healthcare providers.
“I would tell you that the technology is great, but the people are even better,” concluded the co-founder. “If you’re looking for a partner, you choose Audiense.”
