Ep. 184: How the UCA Is Fighting for Higher Urgent Care Reimbursement - Interview with Kristin Rastatter from the Urgent Care Association

PCMP (00:00)
Hey, we're so glad to have you back for another episode of Walk-Ins Welcome as always with Nick and Michael. We're all about helping you get more patients, deliver better care, get repeat visits, scale your clinics. And part of that is connecting with people that are in UCA, people that are advocating on urgent cares behalf. So I'm excited about our guest today, but before I get into any of that, what's up, brother? Man, I am back from a vacation. So somebody's been in a tent for a month.

I've been camping for eight days straight from Birmingham to Bar Harbor main to Acadia National Park with my wife and five year old daughter, which plot twists here. Who would have thought by day four, my five year old's like, I want to go home. So that's real. But we're not here to talk about that. I just want to just, I like to say something about it it was fun. But here's actually talk about our guest today. So we have Kristen Rastetter. She's the advocacy manager at the UCA. So she is that

person that can make the biggest impact for your urgent care. You just don't realize it, but just a couple of background things. She used to be mills on wheels down in Winter Haven, Florida for five years, and she made her move over to the UCA and she's been there since November 2023, so she's gotten her feet kind of wet. So things you know she's learning the ways of the urgent care space and I'm sure she's got more to come. But as a side note too, she'll be launching her own podcast soon.

We love podcast. I put soon in asterisk because I asked her, she had a launch day. says we're working on it, but we're, but it sounds like a summer lunch. So summer 2025, we should hopefully have a new podcast from Kristen and we want you all you guys to come listen, but welcome to the board, Kristen. Kristen, thank you so much for being on the podcast and say hello to the audience. Tell us one thing about you that nobody else knows.

Kristin Rastatter (01:41)
Thank you.

Hi everyone and thank you guys so much for having me again. It's always great to chat with you guys. One thing that people don't know about me, I...

grew up in a very small town in Florida, Plant City, I guess it's not so small anymore, but the Strawberry Festival was a big thing there. And I did a lot of beauty pageants when I was little. They called them junior royalty pageants. So I have many pictures of me as a small child with, the big eighties teased bangs, the big crinoline. And I did clogging, which is like the country version of tap dancing.

PCMP (02:07)
yeah.

clogging.

Kristin Rastatter (02:28)
So.

PCMP (02:28)
So what

I'm gonna need from you on this is some kind of a link on YouTube somewhere of a video of you doing this that I could drop in the show notes. That's we're gonna like we need a photo. And it's not for me, it's for everybody. We all wanna see it. Yeah, we all wanna see some clogging. Yeah. ⁓

Kristin Rastatter (02:30)
you

sure that that footage does not exist. So I'm grateful for that.

PCMP (02:46)
Well,

I can make that happen. Yeah, can make that happen real fast. I just need your picture. Exactly. Well, and you know Hannah. And so ⁓ Hannah jokes that she's the toddler and tiara mom and we're her toddlers. And so she like controls what we're doing here because she controls our content. So she could definitely relate to that side of things because we're her little toddlers running around. and tiaras. Well, toddlers anyway. Yeah. She's a character.

Kristin Rastatter (02:50)
Hahaha!

Love Hannah. Love her.

PCMP (03:13)
Kristen, we've been buddies now for a little while, just through the UCA and hanging out. ⁓ Unfortunately, I didn't get to go to the last one, but Michael was there and he said the first thing was y'all were all high fiving and hugging and everything else. So we consider you not only a friend of the podcast, but just like a friend in general. So it means a lot to us for you, for you to come on. I want to, I want to hear a little bit about your journey from Meals on Wheels, taking that all the way to the UCA.

⁓ Give us a few minutes and just give us her background from meals to wheels to UCA and advocacy.

Kristin Rastatter (03:48)
Sure, ⁓ Meals on Wheels, I kind of, did a little bit of everything. It was a small nonprofit. ⁓ So I was the executive assistant to the director. I was the membership coordinator. I was the recipient coordinator. I was the volunteer coordinator. I was the event planner. I was the fundraising person. I was kind of a little bit of everything, which I thrived in the nonprofit chaos, like just kind of jumping in wherever and doing anything. gave me a lot of...

really great experience and it kind of started that passion for fighting for causes that really matter to me and that I feel should matter to everybody. that kind of sparked that in me. That's when I lived in Florida and then when we moved to Georgia a few years ago, obviously Meals on Wheels is not a remote job. ⁓ So that's when I started at UCA. No, it's not. So started at UCA and I feel like that

PCMP (04:28)
Right.

No, not quite.

Kristin Rastatter (04:45)
That passion that sparked with Meals on Wheels has translated really well to UCA because I've told you guys before, I have four kids. So urgent care has been a part of my life for over 18 years now. So I'm very passionate about urgent care.

PCMP (04:56)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it has.

So you said 18 years now, so do you have someone that's already graduated high school or?

Kristin Rastatter (05:05)
he just did last week.

PCMP (05:07)
Are you okay? Yeah, are you okay?

Kristin Rastatter (05:09)
I'm just now getting okay. I took off a few days from work because I knew I was going to be just a complete mess. ⁓ But he graduated with honors. He's starting UNG in the fall. I can't believe I'm old enough to have a kid that graduated high school, but here we are.

PCMP (05:16)
Right.

Nice.

You're not you're not old enough to have a kid because

you're next year. That's right. That's what I'm saying. I've got one graduating next year, so we're not old enough to have that. We're not now. I refuse to participate in the age game. You're only as old as you feel, right? Yeah, it's just a number. That's right. Age is just a number. Now, I love it. You really have to have a passion in any kind of situation to be able to sell it. But it's especially important if you're in a voluntary role or

Kristin Rastatter (05:31)
⁓

That's right. That's right.

PCMP (05:56)
in a role where you're trying to get people from a philanthropy perspective. you said it's something important to you that everybody should be ⁓ concerned about. So how do you get other people concerned about your cause?

Kristin Rastatter (06:09)
Really just data is always, especially within the urgent care space, urgent care, we wanna see data. We wanna see hardcore facts. We wanna see how is this gonna impact me and my centers and my life and my patients and my staff and all of these things, sharing data. ⁓ I always tell people as advocacy manager, I am not a policy expert. I am not a coding expert. That's why we have.

PCMP (06:13)
Okay.

Kristin Rastatter (06:33)
McDermott, our lobbyist who is amazing. And we have other UCA members that are coding experts and, you know, experts in a lot of these things. I am the rallying the troops expert. I am the one who I've been told I give off cheerleader energy, ⁓ which serves me very well. It's just showing my passion and showing my wise to people. It kind of helps light bulbs kind of go off like, ⁓

PCMP (06:36)
Right.

Yeah, yeah.

Kristin Rastatter (07:03)
Well, yeah, that is really important. Or yeah, I need to be doing this so I can better serve my patients or my community or get paid better so I can expand my centers into underserved areas or I can upgrade my facilities or my training or it just kind of snowballs once you kind of just lay everything out there.

PCMP (07:24)
She's the galvanizer. Yeah, yeah, like you really are like that's an actual like personality trait term. So have you ⁓ are you familiar with Pat Lindsay only at all? Anyway, he wrote a book called the six working geniuses and everybody operates in their own genius and your genius sounds like the genius of galvanizing, which is getting a group of people to take action. Yeah, and you said the cheerleader.

Kristin Rastatter (07:26)
Hahaha

so.

I pride myself

on having that, that I like to think I have that superpower, but.

PCMP (07:56)
Yeah.

Cause I'm about to say that that particular superpower is an absolute drain to most people. We don't have it at all in my company. Yeah. We find it. We discovered like, so we went through the working geniuses and right. Where's the galvanizer like Hannah, you're our galvanizer. She's like, I'm not, I'm not a galvanizer. I have no interest in trying to get people to do things. That's funny. You know, it's a funny Chris and my niece, she's at a, God, this is going to sound terrible when I say it this way, but I don't know how else to say it.

Kristin Rastatter (08:15)
you

PCMP (08:24)
She's at a very low level in her advocacy career. She works for, I think it's called Small Town, where they go into these smaller cities and they try and build up the small businesses in the city. But it's funny because our conversations around everything now are, hey, we have an event coming up or hey, we got the sponsorship available or hey, you know, do you want to come take a tour? You know, and all these different things. And she's got that personality, Chris, and that I think you would appreciate. But you're absolutely right.

not everybody shares in, in, you know, the advocacy. I'm not, if you want some money, I'll throw some money at it. That's fine. But like, I don't, I'm not going to share the passion most of the time, but I expect the audience that we have on this podcast, particularly interested in what you're doing. So break down for us a little bit about what the UCA is current federal advocacy is. ⁓ What is critical, like what's its critical mission?

for urgent cares. then just the hot topics right now that you're having to deal with.

Kristin Rastatter (09:24)
Sure, our main advocacy goal is to get urgent cares paid better. That just blanket statement. We want higher reimbursements for urgent care. We started at the federal level with CMS and Medicare reimbursements. We started this journey a couple of years ago now. Our lobbyist McDermott plus kind of.

helped us figure out what our strategy was gonna be by saying, start with CMS, find a problem that they have and offer a solution. So, ED overcrowding, over utilization. Huge problem for CMS, for everybody, it's just a problem. Urgent care has been ready and able to help with that. We're set up to help with that. We just need more people to know.

that we are set up to help with that. So that's what we started, how we started our conversations with CMS saying, look, if urgent care is more supported financially, then we can help offload the ED. We can expand into underserved areas. We can provide more access to patients. We can do all of these things, but all of the open extended business hours, x-ray capabilities, lab capabilities, all these things that urgent cares can do, they all cost money. I mean, whether the patients are there or not, it costs money.

PCMP (10:36)
Yes.

Kristin Rastatter (10:38)
to be able to have these types of facilities. So we need that federal support. And then hopefully once all of that is kind of tied up nicely and CMS is like, yes, we're on board. We're gonna, you know, up the reimbursements for Medicare. That's when we can start helping it trickle down to commercial payers because historically commercial payers kind of should ish follow suit with what Medicare is doing. So that's our hope that we're gonna get CMS on board with Medicare reimbursements and then tackle commercial

commercial payers or private payers because that's the biggest bulk of urgent care payers, obviously. So that's been our main focus for years now. Federal advocacy is a marathon, not a sprint. I say that all the time. It's a multi-year process, but we have really come a long way in such a relatively short period of time. Even our lobbyists have said, wow, this is happening a lot faster than we expected it to.

PCMP (11:21)
Right.

Kristin Rastatter (11:35)
We've just some recent highlights of some wins that we've had. Last year we had a house congressional letter signed by 26 bipartisan members of the house, humongous. A letter to CMS saying, look, this is what urgent care can do. We need to support them in doing it. Then CMS included us in a RFI or a request for information in last year's physician fee schedule release, asking questions like,

PCMP (11:45)
Come on.

Kristin Rastatter (12:02)
is place of service 20, it adequately describe what urgent care is? ⁓ What types of things would an urgent care need to offer in order to be able to offload ED visits? ⁓ So that in and of itself was a huge win. I mean, the fact that we had very recently just started conversations with CMS and then the very first fee schedule release, they included us, McDermott was like, my gosh.

Like they were already kind of, you know, tempering our expectations like, guys, this is probably gonna happen next year. We're setting up the pins now, we'll knock them down next year. ⁓ So the day that it came out, I mean, I was crying like a baby because it was just so unexpected and such a big win for us. Then more meetings with CMS leaders, both political and career staff, then just February of this year, we had our...

Capitol Hill Advocacy Day or internally we call it Chad. And it was such a fun and such an impactful event. I think we had right up 14 UCA members and in less than a full day we met with over 30 Senate offices. So it was like a ⁓ really fast paced fantastic day just talking to all these Senate offices about what we're trying to do and

PCMP (13:01)
I saw the pictures of that.

Kristin Rastatter (13:28)
see if they want to get on board and support us and our members being there to show that personal side of it. So it's not just our lobbyist saying, know, policy, policy, policy, regulation, regulation, money, money, money. It was people saying, I work in this urgent care that is in your district. This is what I'm doing for your constituents. This is why we need help to help the people that you are serving. So that

having that personal connection, those personal stories, that's a huge part of advocacy. Huge, huge part of advocacy is being able to tell those personal stories. And then most recently, Senator Cassidy from Louisiana sent a letter to CMS basically saying, look, this is we've been talking about this for a while now. This is what urgent care is proposing. We need to be looking into this more. So McDermott has kind of told us

to kind of in our minds look at it as Congress is CMS' boss. So this is like CMS' boss kind of slipping them a note saying, hey, you need to do something about this. So.

PCMP (14:36)
You know, I'm

it's it's a lot of urgent care owners are discouraged right now. And ⁓ I had a conversation yesterday. I was doing a strategy session with an urgent care in Florida and I'll be pretty vague about it because I don't want to call them out. I'm not calling them out, but like I don't want to shout out their name or anything. But when I was talking to him, he's a single like he runs the whole urgent care by himself. He has no other employees. He's start to finish.

Never seen that before. Poor soul. Yeah, I've never seen that before. But ⁓ more importantly, he is trying to find ways to integrate AI and all these different programs to be able to lower costs because he no longer believes that the government is ever going to do anything about increasing payment. He's like, these people still need to be served. These patients still need to be getting healthy and getting the business or the services that they need. And he has lost all hope.

that the government is ever going to increase the pay and he still has a heart to serve these, these people. And, ⁓ so let's, let's talk to the audience for a minute. We have, we, the audience, I'll be on their side for a minute. We have no idea how things are progressing. We have no idea about timeframes on when there's any kind of change that's going to happen.

or the amount of change. So give us a shot in the arm of some kind of hope that something is going to change here in the near future, because we are now at that crossroads of where our expenses and our pay, our reimbursement rates from the payers are at, like we're now at break even. The only thing we can do is kill ourselves in taking on patients, underserving them, not giving them the services they need.

trying to do all these 30 other services that we're not specialized in just to keep our doors open. Talk to us.

Kristin Rastatter (16:32)
completely understand that feeling and it is it's a very shared feeling across a lot of people and things are very uncertain right now and lots of very fast-paced changes are happening and unexpected changes are happening but I can promise you with every ounce of my being that we will not stop fighting until it changes I can promise you that we will not give up

We will keep fighting until there is real change for urgent care because that we know that urgent care is such an important part in health care. Urgent care. think April Gillum always says this urgent care is everyday health care and it is we are that that middle. It's not it's that not, you know, you chopped your arm off. You need to go to the emergency room and not

your primary care where you need a checkup or you can wait a little bit for an appointment. We serve that middle where it's so needed for people and we, meaning UCA and other passionate advocates for urgent care, we're not going to stop. So just hang on, just hang on. I promise we will make it happen. It's just, know, advocacy sometimes can take some time, but don't give up. Don't give up hope.

PCMP (17:52)
So I'm curious, so you had lots of conversations on the Hill back in February. What was the kind of responses that you were getting? Were they surprised? Were they like, yeah, we know this is a thing. We just hasn't been a priority. What kind of responses were you finding?

Kristin Rastatter (18:08)
I will say that our the lab the lobby day that UCA did in 2023 I wasn't there for but I heard a lot of that lobby day was spent really explaining what urgent care is like a lot of the people they were speaking with didn't really know truly what urgent care was so that was pretty much what the entire Hill Day was spent doing this year we did not have to explain one time what urgent care is to any of the offices that we met with

PCMP (18:34)
Okay.

Kristin Rastatter (18:37)
Everybody either had a personal experience with urgent care or knew of somebody that had a personal experience with urgent care. They were positive experiences. So we did not have to waste any time introducing ourselves. We've been stomping our feet long enough to where we're starting to, you know, get recognized more. So that was, that was a big win for us. ⁓ I will say we broke into, I think it was four different groups. The group that I was in,

All the offices that we met were all very supportive. They said, yes, you're right. Urgent care does serve this really important spot in healthcare and it does need to be more supported. ⁓ I will say because we went just a couple weeks after the inauguration, so there were people still trying to figure out where the bathroom is. I mean, there were so many moving parts at that time. ⁓ Nobody was really ready to fully commit.

PCMP (19:26)
That's true. Yeah

Kristin Rastatter (19:32)
to say, I'll sign another congressional letter or yes, I'm gonna jump on board with this with you. So it was, we were at kind of that in between stage, but we did make a lot of really good connections. So when we need to circle back for something, we can say, oh yeah, we met with you back in February and we have this great conversation. so it was, I thought it was...

it really served a great purpose. And the feedback that we got about how important urgent care was to me was just another stoke to our fire. Like we're not having to tell people who we are anymore. They're saying they recognize the importance of urgent care. So that kind of helped, you know, fan the flames a little bit for us.

PCMP (20:21)
I'm about say, because now it's like the branding challenge, Awareness has been established, where you're no longer educating. Now you're just informing of what's next. Because we talk about how expensive and timely it is to teach an audience about something they just don't know. A non-urgent care example here locally, nobody knew what foundation repair was.

Kristin Rastatter (20:27)
Mm-hmm.

PCMP (20:48)
And then all of a sudden we've had years of these billboards. have a crack in my foundation. And it's taken years and years. Like, I guess I have a crack. And now it's like, it took them probably millions of dollars to get to that point to educate a population. Same thing here. It's taken, I because urgent care has been around for 25, 30 years plus. And like you said, two years ago, like, now tell me the difference between urgent care and, you know, whatever. And here we are finally.

yeah, yeah. I've had my experiences. It's one of those, I think COVID, whether we liked it or not, fixed the awareness issue. I get forced like a lot of conversations around who was actually taking care of us and why my primary care doesn't work. And you don't go to the ER for everything. So it's kind of forced some conversations, but it seems like it's sticking now, which to me, at that point, I'm hoping the next phase is like,

Why aren't you guys getting paid more? My goodness, how much money could you be saving us by like not having people go to the ER? We need more urgent cares spread out across this country to save our dollars essentially.

Kristin Rastatter (21:55)
Mm-hmm. Well, and I think another side to that too is and I don't know if you guys saw this at the convention, but I definitely noticed the conversations around advocacy and fighting for fair pay and that sort of thing.

people are starting to want to get involved in it. They're starting to realize the importance of doing that work. So so many conversations at the convention surrounding advocacy, which, know, to me, that's music to my ears. I love, I love that people are wanting to get involved and wanting to talk about it. But to me, that was a big shift from last year's convention where I felt like I was kind of explaining what advocacy is, what we're actually doing. People didn't really know kind of what direction we were taking. And now it's people are coming up to

me saying I love what you guys are doing I want to get involved how can I get involved so that was a big shift for me too

PCMP (22:47)
And that's a big like deep breath for you, right? can breathe for a second and say, okay, I've been trying this for years. Am I getting traction? And then there's that, ⁓ finally. That foundation's starting to be laid and now we can start moving upward and not just hoping it sticks. So it's great to hear, but it's you said, it's a marathon. It takes a long time to get there. Cause I honestly, think it's the awareness piece of...

Kristin Rastatter (22:57)
Yes.

Mm-hmm.

PCMP (23:13)
It's just like, well, you know, whatever. We'll learn more about now. like, okay, yeah, this is a problem. Why haven't we fixed this yet? Like the common sense part starting to kick in, like, why is this a problem now? And then like, let's go fix this. And then now that you're having buy-in on both sides, it feels like, like you said, things are moving quicker all of a sudden. Why I think it's because they're like, ⁓ why, why isn't this fixed yet? Let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go.

Kristin Rastatter (23:34)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think it's our Llewellyn Horowitz, our CEO, I think it's her that always says the us in 10 years is going to be really ticked off if we didn't, if we don't start doing something now, we have to do it now. We can't wait for someone else to do it. We can't wait around and hope it and pray in that something's going to change. We have to be the change right now.

PCMP (23:47)
Yeah, for sure.

So when you're ⁓ up at Capitol Hill or doing your advocating, ⁓ talking to senators, what kind of pushback are you getting? Are you getting pushback? Are you getting indifference from people? I know you're talking about all the good things, which I'm encouraged by, but who's out there going, I'm not interested.

Kristin Rastatter (24:15)
I haven't really heard a lot of just go away, I'm not interested in talking to you. There have been, now's not the right time. The Senator has other priorities right now. ⁓ Get back with me, I'd love to see data on this specific thing and then we can talk. ⁓ So not a lot of just.

stop talking and go away. I haven't come across any of that, which ⁓ I'm thankful for, of course. But just, you know, definitely non-committal stuff.

PCMP (24:45)
That's good.

Yeah, the indifference type situation, or at least, you know, maybe even not talking to the wrong person. Switching gears for just a second since ERs were brought up. I think another one of the challenges, and I'm wondering if y'all are trying to advocate at this level, ⁓ a hospital system that has a urgent care attached to it gets paid better than an urgent care system. ⁓

Kristin Rastatter (24:52)
Mm-hmm. ⁓

PCMP (25:11)
And I give usually worse care. Well, that's because they don't know what they're doing. But that's another story. She's got to play politics on this. I can say that and you can say that, but she cannot engage in that kind of thing. No, she cannot. And we're going to save you from that. That's an awesome dog, though. I love the dog. Grump? Grump? Oh, grunk. Oh, that's good. Is that a standard poodle?

Kristin Rastatter (25:19)
I'm

Sorry.

Grunk broke into the office. Grunk, like Rob Gronkowski, the football player. Yeah.

It is a Moyen poodle. So like middle, middle size poodle. Yeah.

PCMP (25:44)
Moan. Great Island of Moia. An island poodle.

how is advocacy stepping in? I don't know how to say this right, apparently. How are you stepping in and advocating to get at least equal pay as a hospital system? Because that seems very unfair and very unbalanced.

And I think it has something to do with value-based care, but I'm not sure how they can prove that.

Kristin Rastatter (26:15)
Yeah, and we definitely recognize that that's a problem and kind of our angle on this, lack of better words, is we are proposing to CMS a new place of service code for enhanced urgent care centers. So not replacing place of service 20, but an additional enhanced. So we took their definition of place of service 20.

And we added in some language about open extended business hours, x-ray capabilities, lab capabilities, that sort of thing to kind of differentiate ⁓ a true urgent care or these urgent cares that are equipped to offload things from the ED. So our hope is that that's where we're going to start by defining what an actual enhanced urgent care center is. And then once we can get that definition, then that's when kind of that more level work.

comes in as far as then we're also proposing an add-on code, a G code for these enhanced centers to be able to build to get that enhanced reimbursement. So that's when we kind of get down to that nitty gritty work, well, how does CMS define what these enhanced urgent care centers are and who can use this add-on G code and that sort of thing. So we kind of have to start here before we can get down to stuff like that and say, well,

That's not what that's intended for.

PCMP (27:41)
Right. Yeah, I mean that that's a pretty fascinating way to not say shortcut the system, but like kind of move it in the right direction and not try to overhaul something. We're like, hey, if you just add an X-ray machine and some lab stuff, all of a your your reimbursements go up. I mean, that's such a slick, pretty cool way of like approaching that, which I love. I did have one question from you made a comment earlier where people that say, can you

provide me some certain data on some things. What data are most of these Senator groups and whatnot are looking for to be convinced of this? And of that data, what should the individual urgent care be documenting or maybe improving on their data collection to help you have a better opportunity? Like these are real numbers. Make a better case. Make a better case, right? Like, so what kind of data are you looking for? What kind of data should the urgent care improve on?

which may just be through the software itself, that helps you convince a little better.

Kristin Rastatter (28:45)
We, one study that has been very helpful in our efforts is MedPAC did a study back in 2019 and it's, you know, this very long lengthy scientific, you know, white paper thing saying that one third of ED visits could be better treated or more appropriately treated in an urgent care setting. So some of these things like small lacerations or if a dislocated shoulder or, you know, some of these

you know, higher acuity things could be treated in an urgent care at less cost to the patient and to the payer. And the patient's not gonna have to wait, you know, eight hours in an emergency room. They're gonna get seen much more quickly in an urgent care setting. data like what types of visits are you seeing? What level of acuity visits are you seeing? ⁓ Where are lobbyists is even breaking it down to? ⁓

as far as access. So this urgent, know, most people are within a 10 mile radius of an urgent care center. What's size population are you serving in your community? That sort of thing. So they're wanting to see Congress is wanting to see numbers for impact. They're wanting to see what types of visits are you seeing? How many people are you serving? Where's the nearest ED to you? ⁓ We even have one of our UCA

members organizations, they have actually partnered with their ⁓ this hospital system to where they kind of have a an initiative built in to where if somebody does go to the ED and it's for something that could have been treated at an urgent care center, there's actually marketing that follows up with that patient. So whether that be a postcard that gets sent to them in the mail that says we're so grateful that you came in to see us, but just FYI next time this could have been treated at this urgent care. Here's the address.

PCMP (30:42)
Yeah, but

don't come back. But don't come back.

Kristin Rastatter (30:44)
So,

I mean, but just having that, that, you know, ⁓ I'm sure they're, they're a little more, a little more nice than that, but.

PCMP (30:48)
Does the front of the postcards say do better?

They haven't hired the right marketing team yet. got

you. That's so funny. You I do wonder if there's a study out there of like a direct impact of an urgent care where they went into a community that had emergency department and they did not have an urgent care within 10 miles. And they installed an urgent care and determined the number of patients at the ED going up or down and seeing if it actually fluctuated with the number of patients at the urgent care. Cause to me, like that's the direct

Kristin Rastatter (31:03)
⁓

PCMP (31:28)
correlation, right? Like what changed? We inserted one urgent care center, and then all of sudden our reimbursements went down because the value had gone down like what they had to put out for the ED and got moved to the urgent care. So like it's a savings to the reimbursement side. So I don't know if there's a study out there. I feel like there should be if there's not already. Because I'm sure there are still neighborhoods and areas in this country that

Kristin Rastatter (31:52)
I agree.

PCMP (31:55)
are 10 miles from their closest urgent care, but then they have to go to an ED. And I'd love to see that case study. I think it'd be cool if we could find a way to bridge the gap. Yeah. You know, if a hospital system could like sponsor or collaborate with an urgent care, like there's some kind of an agreement where they share the data. Yeah. And then based on that shared data, because of mutual agreements, mutual, I've checked all these boxes to meet this criteria.

Kristin Rastatter (32:00)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes, that I would love to see that too.

PCMP (32:23)
there's approvals in place to do this. Now that shared data, they can see that this customer or patient didn't go to the ER ED because of this. And now the reimbursement rates are justified, saved money here, made money here, clients taken, and I'm still like, get in, get healthy, do better. I'm still going with the postcard. Get better.

Kristin Rastatter (32:49)
you

PCMP (32:49)
do

better. So to our audience, if you know a hospital system that has an ER that's too busy and there's not an urgent care nearby, let's have a conversation. Right. Because I mean, because at the end of the day, could honestly see like, because the ER doesn't want to expand. Like they don't want to add another ER. Like that's not their goal. I can guarantee that. Like they don't want that. And so having them say, okay, like, yeah, we need to offload this.

And we do the reimbursement side of things like pushing out to the urgent care side and just seeing the numbers. Because to me, that's like the perfect case study where a Senator or anybody could not deny it. They could not deny the drops in the cost and then the overall patient quality care goes up, the quality of the care goes up just because now it's being diverted to the right place. they're not, like you said, not sitting there for eight hours. Now they're sitting there for an hour, you know, that type of thing. It's just a huge impact.

Kristin Rastatter (33:45)
And I think

it's really important to point out that it's not us against them. Like we're not in competition with the ER. We're not in competition with primary care. We all have our spot in the healthcare space and it's...

The ER wants to not be overcrowded and overutilized so they can focus on what they do best, which is these life-threatening emergency, they need to have the space and the capability to handle those sort of things and not be handling sinus infections that are coming into the ED. So it's not about competition, it's about collaboration and working together.

PCMP (34:24)
It's been my experience. They absolutely don't want you there. Yeah. Like they don't want you. They don't see blood on the floor. They don't want you there. man. You know, fun, fun story. I took ⁓ Preston, my middle child, to the ER one time because it was in the middle of the night and he was just having a tough time. And most urgent cares in my experience are not open at night. Yeah. But. ⁓

Kristin Rastatter (34:28)
Mm-mm. No.

You

PCMP (34:50)
He is getting frustrated because it's taking so long, but there's this woman who went right back, but she was coughing up blood on the floor and everything. I was like, kiddo relax. She's the reason these things exist, not for your little headache. Right. So, but yes, I am confident that the ER does not want you there. They sure make you feel that way. That's for sure. love it. Awesome. Well, let's talk about your podcast. I want to, I want to segue into that and then we'll roll on out. Okay. So you have a podcast that's going to be focused on advocacy.

Kristin Rastatter (35:06)
Mm-mm. Mm-mm.

PCMP (35:20)
⁓ have you named it yet?

Kristin Rastatter (35:22)
It's very unique name, the advocacy podcast.

PCMP (35:26)
You couldn't come up with a better one.

That's almost as creative as Nick Lamar. Or do better. Do better. That's right. So the advocacy podcast podcast, it's going to be launching soon. can't give you a date, but you've, you've already recorded two episodes and the team is putting it all together. ⁓ Let's talk about who it's for the kind of ⁓ content they can expect on this podcast. So who's it for content they can expect. And is it just you or do you have a co-host or you have guests?

Kristin Rastatter (35:54)
I'm a and I have guests. bring on ⁓ experts or advocacy superstars or my vision for this podcast is I, one of my main goals in my position period is to show people that advocacy can be fun. It doesn't have to be intimidating. It doesn't have to be this big heavy thing. It can be impactful and fun. Two things can be true at the same time. It can be both. ⁓ So I want to show that

PCMP (35:56)
Okay.

Kristin Rastatter (36:23)
The work that we're doing is approachable, that you can get involved on numerous different levels. It doesn't have to be, you you're flying to Capitol Hill to get involved. There's an in-between. There's a bunch of different things that you can do. So ⁓ I plan on having guests from all across the country talk about not only our federal advocacy efforts, but grassroots stuff that's going on. So some of more of these regionalized state-based issues. So limited scope x-ray. ⁓

things that are more state-based, because all of it is important. A lot of this stuff requires continued advocacy. It's not a one and done thing. So I wanna make it, here's what's going on, here's how it can affect you, here's what you can do, and bring on experts to kind of walk people through that.

PCMP (37:12)
That sounds like it's gonna be a fun podcast. Yeah, especially if you can make it fun. ⁓ Don't take this the wrong way, but it kind of reminds me of what Dave Ramsey's done with finances, right? So finances is freaking boring until he talks about it. And it sounds to me like I don't think advocacy is boring, but it could be. I don't know. But maybe people

Kristin Rastatter (37:25)
you

It can be daunting,

so...

PCMP (37:31)
Well, people

just have a preconceived notion about advocacy, right? And you're there to entertain and educate and make it fun. And I think this audience, the urgent care audience needs fun. Uh, like when we were at, when I was at Dallas, was, are you saying that they don't know how to have fun? No, no. mean, well, all right. So, so when I was at Dallas, there were multiple.

Kristin Rastatter (37:33)
Mm-hmm.

PCMP (37:59)
I'll finish this at some point. Having fun. So when I was at Dallas, had multiple people come up were fans of the show, which is really cool. I know Nick had FOMO a little bit because they were going, because one of the guy, one of the urgent care owners said, are you the pilot? It's like, no, I'm not the pilot. That's Nick. He's not here. But they said, I really like your podcast because it's y'all just have a good time. You're having fun. You're not trying to be too serious. And I think they just need that. I mean, because

You think about like running an urgent care, being a doctor in urgent care. There's a high stress piece of that model because you're dealing with sick people. You're dealing with tight margins and you're dealing with long hours. They need relief at some point and like they live and breathe. Like I was literally, so we have, we run Facebook ads to help, hopefully urgent care is engaged with us and hopefully they'll talk to us and try to get them to book into a call. And I do some of the follow-up. And so this lady, she missed a meeting. So I was texting her just to

get her back into our calendar. And she said, sorry, I'm busy. I work seven days a week. Basically she works in the hospital and her urgent care. And she said, I just don't have time, but I'll get back to you soon as I can. And so I'm like, literally said to her, you need to take a break. And she said, I can't. And that's a reality because most of these urgent cares are open seven days a week, right? And so there are times where that person maybe

Kristin Rastatter (39:16)
⁓

PCMP (39:26)
working 14 days straight before they can take a real break. And so like, I think that idea of having fun, not being serious, but getting the point across because like, still want to bring, you want to bring value, we want to bring value, but we want to do it in just a relaxed, entertaining way. I just, love that you're starting a podcast. Yeah, exactly. And I love that it's going be fun and entertaining because we need, we need more of that. For sure.

Kristin Rastatter (39:29)
Mm-hmm.

Yes, well,

and like I said, I'm not a policy expert by trade. So a lot of these things that McDermott is kind of spoon feeding us, I'm having to teach myself, you know,

Policy for dummies basically so then I feel like once I understand it then I can explain it to somebody else who doesn't understand in short spurts I'm not I'm not gonna have you know a two-hour webinar explaining what you know G 2 2 1 1 is Urgent care people are busy like they're busy. They want quick information. They want it lighthearted They want it fun, but they want it informational and that's what I hope to do

PCMP (40:27)
I know you're going to crush it. if you're hearing this, chances are it's maybe launched by now. the advocacy podcast. encouraging it. We're predicting summer 2025. So that's our prediction. Just going to put it out there. Just going to do a search for it. Yeah, the advocacy podcast. Yeah, the advocacy podcast. So I will say, to the lever audience, we always like to have like a negative information or a call to action of some sort for our audience. So if there was one thing that

Kristin Rastatter (40:45)
That's all right.

PCMP (40:56)
an urgent care could do, an urgent care owner or somebody in the urgent care that could help the advocacy side of things. What's the one thing that you would say, just do this, it's going to help everybody else. What would that be?

Kristin Rastatter (41:08)
The number one thing I tell people is reach out to me. Reach out to me is always the best first step. say that because depending on whether you want to get involved in more state-based advocacy or federal advocacy, there could be a coalition that's already in development right now in your state that you might not know about, but I do. So you reach out to me and say, I really want to get involved in, you know, Florida and you know,

PCMP (41:12)
Okay.

Kristin Rastatter (41:32)
whatever's going on in Florida, I say, ⁓ I'm already in touch with these three members that are starting a coalition on this. So I'm going to hook you up with them. So I'm kind of that go between where I can get you. If I'm not the right person to help you, I can get you to the right person. reaching out to me, great first step.

PCMP (41:50)
also and we have all your contact information to show notes because of what we'll have your LinkedIn profile as well. So it'd be pretty easy for people to reach out to you. That's a great easy step to write one email can help save them hours of time. That's right. So that that's fantastic. Love it. I love it. Kristen, we love having you on the podcast today. Why don't you take us out? Give us a last parting shot call to action.

Reach out to you, go listen to the podcast. What else do you want us to know before we take us out?

Kristin Rastatter (42:21)
Reach out to me. As I always say, advocacy works. We are stronger united, but together we are unstoppable.

PCMP (42:31)
Together unstoppable. We'll leave it on that. Y'all have a great week. Kristen, thanks for being on with us and we will see you next time.

Kristin Rastatter (42:36)
Thanks guys.