Rising costs are squeezing urgent care margins. Three places to look for relief: your total technology spend, stale claims, and the staff time your systems consume.
It’s not all about patient volumes and reimbursement rates. Sometimes, it starts with looking more closely at the systems supporting your practice.
The pressure is real. The Urgent Care Association has identified rising costs as a central industry challenge. A June 2025 MGMA poll found that 90% of practices report higher year-to-date operating costs, and that story seems to repeat annually.
Your EHR is a useful place to look for relief. Its financial impact extends beyond the subscription: it also shapes how much work it takes to collect payment, train employees, and keep the clinic moving.
Three opportunities deserve a closer look.
What does your EHR actually cost?
The answer may be spread across several invoices: the core license, patient scheduling and registration, an AI scribe, billing services, and other add-ons.
MGMA estimates that technology and IT expenses generally consume approximately 2–3% of revenue for outpatient groups. If your overall profit margin is in the single digits, you might be able to double your profit with IT savings.
Start by assembling a full month’s spending on your EHR and its surrounding tools. Which services overlap? Which could be consolidated?
That may sound like a lot of information to gather, but it’s what we at Ottehr do in our first meeting with your leadership team: a clear cost comparison anchored in your data. Ottehr’s approach is to bring capabilities such as scheduling, self-registration, ambient scribe, charting, and billing into one platform, reducing the need for separate subscriptions. In a lot of cases, we’re able to drive 30%+ total savings, as we did at a recent deployment.
A completed visit is not the same as a collected payment. Old claims and outstanding patient balances deserve particular attention.
In Experian Health’s 2025 survey, 41% of respondents reported claim-denial rates of at least 10%. We’ve heard even higher rates from our clients in urgent care.
Following up has its own cost. The 2023 CAQH Index found that medical providers spent an average of 24 minutes—and approximately $12—on a manual claim-status inquiry. That won’t surprise you if you’ve ever worked an RCM backlog.
We purpose-built our RCM solution to avoid the headaches created by Experity and other players in the space. In many cases, revenue cycle performance improvements alone justify the switch to Ottehr. Take it from Urgikids:
“We had a mountain of claims that were more than a year old. It put our whole operation at financial risk. Ottehr gets 100% of claims out the same day as the service. That’s a complete game-changer for us.” -Dr. Seema Awatramani, MD, co-owner of UrgiKids urgent care.
How do we do it? Look upstream: how much of the patient’s expected responsibility can be addressed before departure?
Ottehr’s prospective charging feature is designed to help practices address patient responsibility before patients leave. We’re the only EHR that provides this service comprehensively, and there’s no extra cost. The spike in collections is crystal clear.
Some technology expenses show up as staff time rather than vendor charges.
That time is increasingly valuable. Median compensation for medical receptionists, medical assistants, and licensed practical nurses increased by 15–22% over the past five years.
Training is one place to look. Every hour an employee spends learning the system is time unavailable for other work. In the past this was a major hurdle for practices looking to switch EHRs. Ottehr solved the puzzle, reducing practice transition from 3-6 months to 1 month, and accelerating employee training to a matter of a few hours. Every time you bring on a new staff member, that savings multiplies.
“At Quality UC here in Texas, staff completed training on Ottehr in one afternoon, compared with 2-3 months on the previous system.” - Dr. Nimesh Patel, owner and chief medical officer.
Gather your technology invoices, and let’s schedule a call. If we don’t believe we can save you at least 25% on your overall IT costs, we’ll cancel the call before it begins.
For a closer look at these opportunities and Ottehr’s approach to urgent care technology, watch the webinar.
If you’re ready to schedule a conversation, email [email protected]
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