Practice Innovators: Building for success

The clock starts ticking for John Kulin, DO, and his staff the moment a patient walks in the door at Urgent Care Now. Each step along the way is tracked, from door to registration, to how long it takes a patient to get in front of a provider and the length of the encounter. 

John Kulin, DO, with a staff member at one of Urgent Care Now's clinicsAll of these metrics are tracked with one goal in mind: To provide patients with fast, friendly and effective care, in a manner that makes clear that patients’ time and health concerns are of paramount importance, just as important as the time of the physicians and nurses. “Patients expect quality care,” Kulin says. “They expect to have friendly service and friendly staff, so we need to make sure those things are in place.”  

It’s one thing to aspire to that-all practices do. But delivering on that promise while beset by the daily challenges of running a practice is another thing entirely. What Kulin’s practice takes pride in is blending the old fashioned notion of customer service with an effective use of technologies and approaches to engaging patients, motivate staff members and, ultimately, supercharge revenue.

Kulin’s practice is growing, through both expansion and increased patient volume, and it’s happening at a time when independent practices of all kinds are struggling. As a result of its success, Kulin was selected as one of Medical Economics’ innovators, in hopes of sharing some of his successful strategies. These include:

• emphasizing customer service and patient satisfaction by shortening wait times and engaging with patients outside the office through use of the patient portal,

• leveraging appropriate technology-including electronic health records, a patient portal and consumer technology such as iPads-and carefully integrating it into his workflow and patient outreach efforts,

• coordinating care by partnering with the primary care practices in his area to ensure that patients who visit his urgent care aren’t lost in the shuffle, and that their physicians are kept up to date on the care they receive,

• building a goal-oriented, unified company culture that ensures all employees are working at the top of their licenses and share in the vision and goals of the organization, and

• planning a carefully laid out growth and expansion strategy that emphasizes location and replicating past success into new ventures.

As our nation’s healthcare system undergoes rapid changes, entrepreneurs are searching for opportunities to fill existing care gaps. One of those gaps is urgent care- acute injuries or illnesses that are not serious enough for the costly and time-consuming hospital emergency department but too time-sensitive to wait for an appointment with a primary care physician.

Enter urgent care centers: A convenient middle ground that fits a clear need for today’s busy patients. While urgent care is not a new concept, investors clearly believe in its ability to fill this gap in today’s healthcare world: private equity firms have invested more than $2.3 billion in urgent care businesses since 2008, and regional health systems and hospitals have opened their own urgent care centers, according to the New York Times.

Kulin opened his urgent care center for a similar reason: He strived for years as an emergency department physician and director to figure out a way to treat these urgent-but-not-emergency patients more efficiently. “It was frustrating trying to work through systems to get them in and cared for in a proper fashion, and after many iterations in the hospital, it just was not working,” he says. “That was the initial impetus to open an urgent care center.”

But opening does not equal automatic success, as Kulin quickly discovered in 2005. After departing his position as the medical director of the emergency department at Southern Ocean Medical Center, Kulin opened his first center in Manahawkin, New Jersey, where he made his share of mistakes, and was not fully prepared for the business challenges of running a startup, independent medical enterprise. But he survived and learned his way to success, he says.

“I would like to think we physicians are all smart individuals, but when it comes to business, most of us are not,” Kulin says. “We have to learn and go through things and make mistakes, and you see practices fail along the way. If I could go back, I would have got my MBA before I went into opening an urgent care center. I wish I had more business acumen going into it years ago. Going out and going on my own, it was through working my backside off that I survived.”

 

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