As urgent care grows rapidly as a result of health reform in Massachusetts and nationally, healthcare organizations such as Emerson Hospital are seeking to provide a better, more convenient and retail-like experience for their patients.
The project team worked with Emerson to determine the feasibility of this business strategy, and identified optimal locations for siting urgent care clinics, primary care offices, and lab/x-ray services in a specific market area. Using client-provided hospital claims data, physician claims data, and publicly available demographic and insurance mix data, the team created visualizations that analyzed aspects of Emerson’s competitors, drive/travel times, service demand, and location. Three location clusters were identified to be most suitable for the location of primary and urgent care facilities based on a customized modeling process.
LOCATION
Concord, MA, USA
WITH
SCALE
Large
YEAR
2015
*These categories list the skills and technology that I personally contributed to these projects.
PRACTICE CATEGORIES
PROJECT ROLE
SCOPE ELEMENTS
SKILLS*
TECHNOLOGY*
See below for a gallery of my favorite images from this project. Click the image to expand.
This map highlights the service areas defined by Emerson Hospital (EH). In addition, NBBJ defined an ‘Additional Study’ zone at the periphery of the primary, secondary, and emerging service areas defined by Emerson.
This map highlights the service areas defined by Emerson Hospital (EH). In addition, NBBJ defined an ‘Additional Study’ zone at the periphery of the primary, secondary, and emerging service areas defined by Emerson.
This map highlights population as recorded in the 2013 American Community Survey at the census block level. Each dot represents five residents.
This map shows overall employment distribution in a much wider area, and is similar to the population study in that each dot represents five jobs.
These various maps incorporate demographic data from the 2013 American Community Survey. Where possible, the data is mapped at the census block group level of detail. Many of the demographic layers inform the urgent care and primary care suitability analysis.
These maps highlight drive time distances from each urgent care, primary care, lab, and xray facility. For urgent care and primary care facilities, the maps show that almost all of EH’s service area is covered by five and ten minute drives times, with very few locations outside of the ten minute zone.
These maps, charts, and graphs incorporate data from the Advisory Board Market Estimator. This bar chart organizes the estimated growth into EH’s service areas and highlights that the most robust growth is expected in the additional study area.
Right Top: This map incorporates all urgent care facilities (competitor, affiliate, and EH) within the service area into a heat map visualization. Actual facilities are located with black and orange symbols. The visualization indicates clustering of urgent care facilities with darker gray, and less clustering indicated as lighter gray or white. Right Bottom: The urgent care estimates indicate robust growth for communities in the additional study area, and solid growth for many areas in EH’s main service area. The largest growth is mostly in the eastern half of the market: the top ten zip codes for growth are indicated with black hatching.
The following analysis and mappings were created utilizing data provided by Emerson Hospital for urgent care patients treated in the Emergency Department. Overall, the data shows that urgent care visits are increasing. Over the two year period, the total number of visits was higher on the weekends and during the summers. Almost all were single visits.
The map on the far right identifies the best locations for urgent care based on the suitability analysis conducted (model detail provided in later images). The three main clusters, identified in red on this map, are Hudson-Marlborough, Burlington- Lexington, and Natick.
Cluster close-up.
The layers to the right comprise the urgent care suitability analysis. Each layer is generated using a scale of 1 (the least favorable for future urgent care locations) to 7 (the most favorable for future urgent care locations). A color scale from yellow to green to red indicates increasing favorabilty. Then, the layers are combined according to the weight established by the charts on the previous page.
In order to conduct a suitability analysis to select and optimize future urgent care and primary care locations, NBBJ and EH engaged in an exercise to rank proposed criteria. (It was agreed that lab and x-ray would tag onto the selected locations rather than exist separately.) The rankings are scaled from 1 (the least importance to future locations) to 5 (the highest importance to future locations). The rankings are then translated to weighted percentages as outlined in the charts at the far right.
See below for a slideshow of images from this project. Click the image to expand.