Urgent Care Acuity Grows Complemented By Rise in Utilization

[Ashley Blachford]

In a new trend report that examines healthcare spending in the United States based on a large claims database, Trilliant Health notes that from 2018 to 2025, there was a measurable shift toward higher-acuity procedure codes across all of healthcare. In urgent care specifically, use of higher-acuity codes such as CPT 99204 increased from 22.4% in 2020 to 42.3% in 2025, while at the same time, lower-acuity codes like CPT 99202 declined from 17.8% to 2.2%. Looking closer at the data presented, it also appears urgent care saw a larger increase (19.9 percentage points) in its use of higher-acuity codes compared with physician offices (11.5 percentage points) and emergency departments (5.9 percentage points) over the 5-year time period.

Urgent care utilization growth: The claims data also reveals that the percentage of patients using urgent care has increased as well—from 10.8% of patients in 2019 to 11.9%. Meanwhile, emergency department use decreased slightly from 20.3% of patients in 2019 to 19.4% in 2025. Overall, the share of patients using any kind of healthcare is flat, according to the report.


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