Danger Ahead – Radiology in Urgent Care Clinics

You may have noticed a “shortage” of radiology techs in your area. But it’s not just a numerical shortage, it’s a career dissatisfaction issue as well.

The Future of Radiology Within Urgent Care Clinics

We as an industry are doing less X-rays because we are doing less injury care. Why would an X-ray tech want to work where they only do 1 or 2 X-rays per day, which is usually the extent of X-rays done at many centers these days.

Why is that? Two things.

1. We refer so many injuries out to Orthopedic Urgent Cares that the communities are learning not to come to us for injury care.
2. Orthopedic Urgent Cares are popping up everywhere. In Chicago the area alone there is now more than 47 of them.

This means Urgent Care clinics are often literally giving this business away. We need to wake up and start treating simple fractures! This is the only way your community, clients, and partnering corporations will learn that “we do ortho”! Where did our one-stop-shop injury care value proposition go? Because I can tell you, the Ortho groups with Urgent Cares are marketing their clinic to every patient you send them.

We must keep injury care in order to have enough X-rays for our X-ray techs!

How OccDocOne Can Help

The key to this will be your provider’s comfort level doing fracture care. I have created a web-based tool, OccDocOne, that can upgrade your provider’s performance immediately for both Occ Med and Urgent Care injury management. There are over 300 guidelines including 63 specific fractures.