Health care utilization and outcomes of patients seen by virtual urgent care versus in-person emergency department care

BACKGROUND: Virtual urgent care (VUC) is intended to support diversion of patients with low-acuity complaints and reduce the need for in-person emergency department visits. We aimed to describe subsequent health care utilization and outcomes of patients who used VUC compared with similar patients who had an in-person emergency department visit. METHODS: We used patient-level encounter data that were prospectively collected for patients using …