MNB Guest , 2025-12-12 21:43:00
This year, urgent care centers nationwide are bracing for another intense respiratory season, with a notable rise in patient volumes expected. In 2022, there were over 206 million urgent care visits recorded, exceeding the 131 million emergency department visits. These centres have become the front line in managing respiratory illnesses.
At several of the recent urgent care association meetings (CALUCA, NERUCA, and SERUCA), conversations were centered on a common problem: how to achieve and maintain diagnostic accuracy and optimal outcomes when faced with large influxes of patients.
New solutions are needed to manage the upcoming flu season to tackle patient bottlenecks, diagnostic uncertainty, and optimize patient treatments. Precision molecular diagnostics are becoming indispensable in this effort. Innovative companies such as HealthTrackRx are emerging as critical partners for health care providers, offering next-generation diagnostic solutions tailored to urgent care needs.
The Core Challenges Facing Urgent Care During Respiratory Season
Managing Patient Volume Surges:
Urgent care facilities in the U.S are strained by the annual respiratory illness season. Every year, patient volumes rise significantly during the holiday period, which not only leads to extended wait times, but also to staff burnout and diminished clinic capacity. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has noted it expects continued strain on resources this 2026 respiratory season, similar to peak hospitalizations in previous years.
Addressing Diagnostic Ambiguity:
Research has shown that over 37% of emergency department patients are discharged without a definitive diagnosis. This statistic serves to highlight the diagnostic uncertainty in healthcare settings. For urgent care clinicians, differentiating between respiratory infections still remains a central diagnostic challenge despite advances in technology. Conditions such as influenza, RSV, COVID-19, strep throat, and the common cold often present with similar symptoms, making a definitive diagnosis very difficult if HCPs rely only on how the patient presents. Because of this, antibiotics are often unnecessarily overprescribed, contributing to the spread of illness. Moreover, providers face additional pressures to deliver optimal care in high-volume settings.
Improving Treatment Pathways:
Urgent care providers must make rapid, accurate decisions for each patient under significant time constraints. Diagnostic ambiguity in respiratory illnesses directly impacts confident and targeted treatment selection, leading to unnecessary downstream healthcare utilization and suboptimal patient outcomes. Confusion in acute care impacts both providers and patient outcomes. This highlights how important fast and accurate diagnostics are. Identifying the correct pathogens plays a key role in helping providers choose the right treatment options and avoiding unnecessary or cautious care, making the difference between targeted treatment and defensive medicine.
The Diagnostic Imperative: Urgent Care’s Need for Speed and Precision
Traditional diagnostic methods like rapid antigen tests and culture-based diagnostics, often fall short in delivering the swift and definitive answers that are needed in busy urgent care centers. Rapid antigen tests can miss early infections or cases with a low-viral-load which can lead to false negatives. Additionally, culture-based diagnostics, despite their high specificity, demand days for results. This delay can slow down important care decisions during busy respiratory seasons. In these crucial times fast results and accurate diagnosis are not just helpful, they are absolutely essential to treat patients effectively.
Advanced molecular diagnostics, notably Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) testing, offers a transformative solution to disease detection. PCR stands out by identifying genetic material offering excellent accuracy and sensitivity in finding pathogens. Many modern systems can test for various respiratory pathogens using just one sample. This simplifies the process, speeds up diagnosis, and gives a broad view of infections, allowing for quicker and more accurate conclusions.
However, PCR technology on its own is not enough. This vital information needs to reach urgent care providers fast enough and on a large enough scale to improve patient care.
HealthTrackRx: A Strategic Partner for Urgent Care Resilience
Delivering Next-Morning Results at Scale:
HealthTrackRx has solved this delivery challenge with a ground-breaking model that provides next-morning PCR results at scale. The approach is proving instrumental for both patients and clinicians. “We’re redefining infectious disease diagnostics,” said Martin Price, CEO of HealthTrackRx, in remarks to Jane King at the New York Stock Exchange. “By delivering results by the next morning we can get patients on the right therapy immediately.” The focus on quick turnaround times plays a key role in resolving diagnostic uncertainty. It helps clinicians make quicker and smarter treatment choices while also improving outcomes for patients.
Scalable Infrastructure and Nationwide Access:
The logistics challenge of rapid diagnostics isn’t just about technology, it’s about infrastructure. HealthTrackRx addressed this challenge, investing $45 million in a state-of-the-art lab at UPS LabPort in Louisville, Kentucky. The 60,000-square-foot facility, which has been operational since September 2025, treats diagnostic samples as time-sensitive cargo, making sure that a sample collected from a rural clinic receives the same next-morning turnaround as one from a big city.
Enhancing Patient Management through Precision:
When uncertainty in diagnoses pushes doctors to prescribe, it harms everyone. Patients end up with care that isn’t optimal, treatment resistance worsens, and costs skyrocket. HealthTrackRx’s precision molecular diagnostics looks to break this cycle by providing definitive pathogen identification overnight. This allows clinicians to confidently prescribe targeted antivirals for influenza, avoid unnecessary antibiotics for viral infections, and make faster, evidence-based decisions to support patient outcomes.
According to a comprehensive provider survey run by HealthTrackRx, 80% of clinicians using the laboratory reported that next-morning results changed their antibiotic prescribing decisions. Moreover, 76% reported faster time to accurate treatment, 52% reported fewer return visits, and 48% reported fewer recurring infections.
The Future of Urgent Care Diagnostics is Here
The tools needed to transform urgent care diagnostics are already available. What has been missing is the infrastructure to deliver accurate, precision testing at the speed and scale that is needed to change clinical practice behaviour. Advanced molecular diagnostics help patients get better care, improve operational efficiency, and eliminate diagnostic uncertainty. But these tools only work when doctors get results fast enough to guide first treatment decisions. HealthTrackRx uses a model that delivers results the next morning marking a change from defensive guessing to evidence-backed precision, made available across the country. The real issue now isn’t whether these fast molecular tests can work, but whether urgent care systems will start using them soon enough to tackle future challenges.
Image by DC Studio from freepik
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