Provider Manual · Part XXI

Urgent care & walk-in

Turn the practice into a modern walk-in clinic: a sign-up patients finish in a handful of taps, a Waiting Room board where one button moves each patient forward, insurance verified for urgent care on the spot, and copays collected while people wait.

4 sections~9 min read9 screenshots

XXI

Part XXI

Urgent care & walk-in

21.1Turn it on

Switch on Urgent Care & Walk-in

Urgent Care & Walk-in is an organization-level feature for clinics that see patients without appointments. It adds three things: a Waiting Room board where staff run the day, a walk-in sign-up patients open from their phone or a tablet at the door, and an Admin > Urgent Care page that sets the hours, safety questions, insurance and copay behaviour, texts, and rooms. Everything else — the chart, the note, paperwork, questionnaires, eligibility, billing — is the Hero EMR you already use: a walk-in is a same-day visit like any other.

Open the feature switch. Go to Admin > Additional Features and find the Urgent Care & Walk-in card. It ships off.
Flip it on and read the IMPACTED SURFACES line. It lists what appears: the Waiting Room board and its + Walk-in button, Admin > Urgent Care, the patient portal’s /walk-in page, walk-in text updates, and urgent-care benefit checks.
Finish setup before the first patient. The board and the sign-up page stay paused until the readiness checklist in 21.2 is green.

Additional Features dialog showing the Urgent Care and Walk-in card switched to Enabled — One switch, in `Admin` > `Additional Features`. Default off.

Who can see what. Front desk, medical assistants and nurses get the board through the urgent_care.view and urgent_care.manage permissions (added to those presets). Collecting a copay on the board additionally needs the existing billing.payments.collect. Changing settings needs admin.urgent_care.manage or an admin role.

21.2Settings

Admin > Urgent Care

Open Admin > Urgent Care. The readiness checklist at the top tells you exactly what is still missing; until it reads Ready, patients see “Online sign-up is not set up yet” and the board shows a paused banner.

Section	What to set
General	Online sign-up and in-person kiosk mode; the walk-in visit type (one click creates a 15-minute “Walk-in visit” for you — its provider owns the walk-in queue on the calendar); the location; walk-in hours per weekday in the clinic’s local time; how many minutes before close to stop new sign-ups; an optional maximum line length.
Triage & safety	The acuity scale (Low / Medium / High, or ESI 1–5); the safety questions every patient answers at sign-up (chest pain, trouble breathing, stroke signs, and so on — edit or add your own); whether a “Yes” shows ER advice, whether the patient may stay in line afterwards, and the nearest ER’s name, address and phone.
Insurance & payment	Verify insurance at sign-up (runs an urgent-care benefits check); accept any payer or only your accepted list; warn or refuse out-of-network plans; collect the copay while the patient waits, and by which methods (online card on the patient’s phone, cash or check at the desk). The self-pay price comes from the walk-in visit type’s billing rule.
Messages	Text updates on or off; when to send “You’re up soon”; the wait-shift threshold that raises the board alert; the quick messages staff can send with one tap.
Rooms	The exam rooms the board offers when you room a patient.

Admin Urgent Care settings dialog with the readiness checklist reading Ready and the General section showing hours per weekday — The readiness checklist is the only thing you must get green. Everything else has a sensible default.

The walk-in intake account. The first save creates a password-less staff account named Walk-in intake. It starts patients’ check-in sessions on the clinic’s behalf and cannot sign in. Leave it alone; deleting it pauses online sign-up until you press Create the walk-in intake account again.

21.3The patient side

Getting in line from a phone

Patients open <your portal address>/walk-in — link it from your website (“Get in line”) or print it as a QR code at the door. The whole sign-up is one screen at a time, with big buttons, and a returning patient reaches their ticket in about seven taps. The ticket is issued before insurance: the paperwork, insurance and copay are a checklist the patient works through while waiting.

Phone number. The first screen shows the clinic, whether the line is open, how many are waiting, and the estimated wait. The patient enters a mobile number and taps Get in line; a six-digit code confirms it. Text updates are on by default and can be declined.
Who is this visit for? Me or My child, then last name and date of birth. If the phone number and those details match a chart, the patient is recognised (“Maria G. · Returning patient”). If not, the same screen asks for the rest — first name, sex, and for a child the parent’s name — and Hero creates the chart.
Reason for visit. One tap on a category (cold/flu, injury, rash, UTI…) and an optional line of detail. Staff see it on the board; it is never texted.
Quick safety check. Your safety questions, each answered Yes or No, or None of these in one tap. A “Yes” shows the ER advice screen with your configured ER, a Call 911 button and directions; the patient can keep their place in line if you allow it, and the board flags them in red either way.
The ticket. “A-17 · 3 people ahead of you”, the estimated wait once they have arrived, messages from the clinic, and the while-you-wait checklist: Insurance, Consent forms, Questions for the visit, and Copay. Patients who signed up from home see an I’m here button; tapping it checks them in.

Walk-in welcome screen on a phone showing the clinic name, open until time, people in line, estimated wait, a mobile number field and a Get in line button — Welcome + phone in one screen. The wait is shown as a range, never a promise.

Walk-in ticket screen showing ticket A-17, three people ahead, and the while-you-wait checklist with Insurance, Consent forms, Questions and Copay rows — The ticket page is the patient’s home for the visit; every text links back to it.

Insurance and the copay. The Insurance row offers Use the insurance on file, Add insurance (scan the card or type the member ID), Self-pay, or I’ll do this at the front desk. When a plan is added or confirmed, Hero runs an eligibility check that asks specifically for urgent care benefits. A verified urgent-care copay shows as “Copay $40 — Pay now” and the patient can pay on their phone; if the payer only returned an office copay, the patient sees “about $30 — the front desk will confirm” and staff confirm it on the board before anyone is asked to pay.

Walk-in safety check screen listing questions such as chest pain and trouble breathing with Yes and No buttons and a None of these button — Every question needs an explicit answer. Nothing is defaulted to No.

ER advice screen recommending the emergency room with the configured ER name, address and phone, a Call 911 button, directions, and a keep-me-in-line link — ER advice with your configured ER. Whether the patient can stay in line is your setting.

Text messages. Patients who opted in receive short, fixed texts: when they join (with the link back to their ticket), when they are up soon, when you call them (“We’re ready for you — please come to the front desk”), when waits move and you choose to tell them, when you send a custom message, ER advice, and a portal invitation after discharge. No text ever contains the reason for the visit or a room number, and every one goes only to the number the patient verified.

Kiosk mode. Open /walk-in?kiosk=1 on a tablet at the door. It is the same sign-up without wait times; after the ticket it shows “Have a seat — we’ll text you” for twenty seconds, signs the patient out, and returns to the first screen. Nothing is stored on the device.

21.4The Waiting Room board

Running the day

Open Waiting Room from the toolbar (it also appears as a tab). One page, no sub-tabs. It refreshes every five seconds while you are looking at it; the dot at the top right tells you how fresh it is.

The strip at the top. How many are waiting, the longest wait, today’s median door-to-provider time, and Providers on floor — click a name to mark a provider on or off. This drives the wait estimate patients see, so keep it honest. Line: Open switches to Closing (no new sign-ups, everyone in line is still seen) or Closed.
Alerts. A red bar names anyone who answered Yes to a safety question — triage them first. An amber bar appears when waits moved past your threshold for people already in line: Text them sends one honest “waits just moved” message to everyone waiting who opted in.
The line. Grouped in order: Not here yet, Waiting, In triage, Roomed, With provider, Done today. Within Waiting the sickest come first (acuity, then anyone you moved to the top, then arrival time). Each row shows the ticket, the wait timer, the reason, the acuity chip, insurance and forms readiness, the copay state, the provider and room.
One button moves a patient forward. Mark arrived → Triage → Room… (pick a room; occupied rooms are greyed) → Start visit (opens the note in a tab) → Discharge. The ⋮ menu holds the shortcuts and corrections: skip triage, skip the room, back one stage, send to the ER, transfer to the ER after assessment, left without being seen, remove from the line, move to the top, assign a provider, copy the status link.
Talk to the patient without leaving the board. Call texts “we’re ready for you” without changing their stage. Message opens your quick messages plus a free-text box; Enter sends.
Collect the copay. Click the copay chip: charge the card on file, text a pay link, record cash or check, or Defer (one click, with Undo). An estimated copay shows Confirm first — nobody is asked to pay an amount the payer did not verify for urgent care.

Waiting Room board with the stats strip, providers on floor, a red safety-flag alert, and patients grouped under Waiting, In triage, Roomed and With provider, each row with a primary action button — The board. Primary buttons advance one stage; everything else is one click away.

Add a walk-in dialog with a patient search on the left, reason chips, acuity and a text-the-check-in-link option on the right — `+ Walk-in` (or press `n`): find or create the patient, pick a reason, add to the line.

Collect copay popover on a board row listing charge card on file, text a pay link, collected cash, collected check and defer — Collecting the copay from the row. Only staff with the payments permission see it.

Adding someone at the desk. + Walk-in finds an existing chart (name, phone, DOB or MRN) or creates one in four fields. Check Text them the check-in link and record their spoken consent: the text carries a link that asks for a code before it shows anything, so the phone proves itself first. Patients without a phone can finish forms and insurance on the check-in kiosk (Admin > Kiosk must be on) via the row’s kiosk hand-off.

Where walk-ins live in the rest of Hero. Every walk-in is a same-day visit under the walk-in visit type’s provider on the calendar, with a draft encounter, the paperwork and questionnaires your rules assign, and the usual billing. The provider who clicks Start visit becomes the encounter’s provider. If someone completes or cancels the visit from the chart or the calendar, the board catches up on its own.

Keyboard. / jumps to the search box, n opens + Walk-in. Neither fires while you are typing in a field.

Need help? Email support@heroemr.com.