Urgent Care hours for November

Dear Members of the MIT Community,

 

I am writing to let you know you about an experiment we are conducting here at MIT Medical. Throughout the month of November, we are changing Urgent Care’s operating hours and offering additional services when Urgent Care is open during the weekdays. From November 1–30, Urgent Care will be open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m, seven days a week.

 

 

We are always working to improve the services we provide to the MIT community. As part of that process, we want to better understand when it makes the most sense for us to be open for our patients, and what services should be available during the times that Urgent Care is open. A recent analysis of our utilization data shows that we see relatively few patients outside of the 8 a.m.–8 p.m. window year-round. In fact, last November we saw an average of four patients a night after 8 p.m.

 

Since relatively few people use the Urgent Care Service in the late evening, it makes sense for us to focus our efforts on high-usage times when we are open. So while we test closing Urgent Care at 8 p.m., we are also extending hours of our Laboratory and Radiology Services to match Urgent Care hours on weekdays (Monday–Friday). These services usually close at 5:15 p.m. Extending those hours means that patients who need an X-ray or a blood draw at 7 p.m. will not need to go off campus for those tests as they do now.

 

We’ve conducted similar Urgent Care hours pilots on Institute holiday weekends this past year and for two months this past summer. Those experiments appeared to be successful, as utilization data suggests that patients were unaffected by shorter summer or holiday weekend hours. Now we are seeing if the same holds true during the academic year.

 

 

We plan to take what we learn (along with data from the holiday and summer tests) and assess if we should make a permanent change to Urgent Care operating hours. Depending on what the data shows, permanent changes, if any, would occur no earlier than Summer 2018.

 

If you have any concerns or questions, we encourage you to write to us at medical@mit.edu. We are here for you, and your opinions and concerns help drive our decisions.

 

Sincerely,

Cecilia Stuopis