Urgent Care Site Selection
The 10- and 20-minute drive isochrone defines urgent care access. Coverage gaps — areas where residents drive further than 20 minutes to the nearest facility — are both a public health issue and a market opportunity. Healthcare site selection is the fastest-growing use case for drive-time isochrones. Map real patient access zones before committing to a location.
Time zones
Urgent care is fundamentally a convenience service. Patients with non-emergency conditions make a rapid, proximity-driven decision: they choose the nearest facility they can reach within a reasonable drive. Research consistently shows that 20 minutes is the outer bound of what most patients will accept when alternatives exist — a primary care office, a telehealth visit, or a retail clinic. Beyond 20 minutes, patient behavior changes significantly and ER utilization rises.
This 20-minute threshold creates a measurable geography. Every area where residents are more than 20 minutes from an urgent care facility is a coverage gap — a population without reasonable access. That gap is simultaneously a public health problem and a business opportunity. The fastest-growing segment of healthcare real estate runs on this exact analysis: find the gap, size the addressable population, and site the facility to maximize patient access.
Primary zone
60–70% of a site's patients come from inside this polygon — the core catchment
Secondary zone
Secondary demand — patients who accept a longer drive when the primary zone is saturated
Coverage gap
Unserved population — both an access inequity and the addressable market for a new site
Three failure modes
A radius circle that spans a highway, a rail corridor, or a river implies access that doesn't exist. Residents on the other side of a physical barrier can be substantially further in drive time than the radius suggests. A coverage gap analysis built on radius circles systematically undercounts the unserved population.
Markets that look dense by facility count can still have coverage gaps when analyzed by drive-time polygon. Three facilities whose 20-minute polygons all cover the same downtown core may leave surrounding neighborhoods completely unserved — a pattern invisible in a radius-based density map but obvious in polygon overlap analysis.
For health systems planning the second and third urgent care site in a market, polygon overlap analysis shows exactly how much patient volume the new location will draw from existing sites. A radius-based analysis that shows "no overlap" between sites 4 miles apart may be wrong if a major arterial connects them directly.
Feature breakdown
Generate 10- and 20-minute drive isochrones around any candidate site. The population inside the 10-minute polygon is your core catchment; the 20-minute ring captures secondary demand. Compare the polygon to existing facility locations to quantify coverage and identify where access is genuinely new.
Identify geographic areas where no urgent care facility is within a 20-minute drive. These coverage gaps represent both an access inequity and an unserved market. Export the gap polygon to quantify the population without reasonable access — the core metric for any new-market entry decision.
Overlay drive-time polygons for all existing facilities in a market. Areas with dense polygon overlap are saturated; areas with few overlapping polygons represent under-served catchments — even if they look close on a map. The polygon density view is the correct saturation analysis for healthcare real estate.
For health systems operating multiple urgent care sites, trade area overlap determines whether a new location adds access or cannibalizes an existing site's patient volume. 20% polygon overlap is the common internal threshold — above that, the new location is primarily redistributing existing patients rather than capturing new ones.
FAQ · Urgent care site selection
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