Urgent care centers provide a valuable service that bridges the gap between your doctor's closed office and the emergency room. Yet the urgent care ward isn't a substitute for having a primary care doctor, so when you get out of your urgent care appointment, you have to take a few more steps to ensure there's no break in care. If your urgent care visit was for something acute that was solved at urgent care, you still need to follow up in the next few days because you don't want the information or the bills to get lost in the shuffle.

Make a Follow-up Appointment With Your Regular Doctor

Do make a follow-up appointment with your regular doctor. Most conditions will likely need additional attention. For example, going to urgent care to find out you have a bad cold may not need a follow-up appointment if your recovery appears to be going well. However, if you had what the urgent care doctor diagnosed as a new allergy, you'll need to see your doctor and possibly get a referral to an allergist, who can determine the severity of the allergy and discuss medication, desensitization treatments, and coping skills.

Contact Your Insurance Company

Urgent care clinics take most insurance; however, their procedures for taking insurance can vary. They can bill your insurance directly, require you to file the claim so they can bill, or give you the full bill and have you get reimbursed by the insurance company. They may have different co-pays than what your doctor would require you pay before a regular appointment. On the next business day, contact your insurance company and find out exactly what you should expect. If the urgent care center billed the insurance directly, what happens if there are procedures the insurance company won't cover? Will those be waived or will you receive a second bill?

You also want to be sure that the urgent care center actually billed the insurance company with the correct designation. Most urgent care centers will code your appointment as an urgent care visit, and if you went somewhere that called itself "urgent care", that's the type of coding you should see. However, NBC News reports that a number of freestanding emergency rooms have called themselves "emergency centers" which, when combined with the fact that the centers are in places like strip malls and not near hospitals -- and in some states, they're not required to note that they are for emergency room-type care and not urgent care -- has caused confusion among patients. Yes, you should verify before you go that the place you chose really is urgent care, but if you were ill, you may not have thought much about anything other than that medical cross you saw on the building.

For more information, you can contact clinics like the Walk-In Family Medicine Center.