Five Star Urgent Care, a provider of walk-in, urgent-care services, has launched a new website that enables patients to view current wait times for any of its six medical facilities directly on the home page. Five Star updates the wait times in real time, which it says enables patients to make more informed decisions regarding […]
Five Star Urgent Care, a provider of walk-in, urgent-care services, has launched a new website that enables patients to view current wait times for any of its six medical facilities directly on the home page.
Five Star updates the wait times in real time, which it says enables patients to make more informed decisions regarding their health.
The urgent-care practice announced the new website feature in an Oct. 2 news release.
Five Star says it has “optimized” the new website (www.fivestaruc.com) for desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets so customers may access the wait times while they are at home or on the go, according to the release.
People don’t like to wait, Dr. John Radford, founder of Five Star Urgent Care, says in an interview.
“So we wanted to be transparent and let people know how long wait times would be,” he adds.
Some emergency rooms nationwide have started a similar practice, hoping to redirect traffic from emergency rooms for people minor ailments, according to Radford.
Five Star is aiming to give patients a “heads up” and choice if they’re traveling in an area within driving distance of two sites so the patient can decide which location would have the shortest wait for a visit.
“Our average in and out time is between 30 and 40 minutes, so there’s never really much of a wait time, but there are different peaks and spikes,” says Radford.
The wait-time feature is part of a revamped website for Five Star Urgent Care. Buffalo–based 19 Ideas, a marketing and communications agency, created and manages the Five Star site.
“So, this is like version two of our first website and we just integrated this new feature into it,” says Radford.
Five Star had been discussing and planning for the new site for about a year, he adds.
When asked if Five Star bases the wait times on the number of people in the waiting room or their ailments, Radford replied, “A little of both.”
“It’s primarily based on volume, but we also know that we could have three very simple things there [that] would take a short time to go through, and we may have one patient that would take longer than the time to [handle] the three,” he says.
Five Star adjusts the wait times at individual office locations based on algorithms that it assembled, assigning different time values, depending on the person’s ailment.
For example, Five Star will assign a different time value to a patient seeking treatment for a sore throat than to an individual who fell and needs an X-ray and a suture.
“The [employees] … right at the front desk … are on the front lines putting the times in and updating it … roughly between every 15 and 20 minutes,” says Radford.
Radford declined to disclose how much the new feature cost the company, saying it was part of the overall cost of the website upgrade.
Five Star on Sept. 4 opened a location in Fayetteville, representing its third office in the Syracuse area and sixth overall.
Earlier in the year, it opened a location at 3504 W. Genesee St. in the Fairmount area of Camillus.
Five Star first entered the Syracuse market in May 2013 when it opened a new facility on Route 11 in Cicero.
It also operates offices in Ithaca, Big Flats, and Jamestown.
Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com