Next-Generation
Urgent Care
Transformation
Industry: Healthcare | Urgent Care | Health IT
Client: The leading EMR platform system provider in Urgent Care
Engagement Type: Customer Advisory Board Design & Facilitation • Strategic Pivot • Product Innovation • Customer Engagement Strategy
Timeframe: March 2022 – November 2023 (quarterly cadence: in-person twice/year, virtual twice/year, plus ELT strategic review)
18–22%
Reduction in patient
wait time
10–12%
Improvement in patient satisfaction
5–8%
Improvement in clinician satisfaction
The Challenge
The client — the leading EMR platform system provider in Urgent Care — powered a national network of urgent care clinics with their electronic medical records and practice management technology. Their success depended on staying ahead of an industry undergoing rapid, compounding transformation.
During and immediately after the 2020 pandemic, urgent care organizations faced a convergence of pressures that no single company could navigate in isolation:
Clinician and staff shortages: The pandemic had driven unprecedented burnout and attrition across urgent care. Organizations needed to fundamentally rethink how they would attract and retain top talent — not just fill shifts, but build sustainable workforce models.
An EMR platform ripe for reinvention: There was broad consensus that the current urgent care operating model was ready for innovation. The question was how the EMR system could be optimized to enable new experiences and value across the entire care delivery chain — from patient intake to clinician workflow to post-visit engagement.
Pandemic preparedness: The COVID-19 crisis exposed every gap in the system simultaneously. Providers needed to build capacity and capabilities into their operating models to withstand the next major public health event — not just react to the current one.
Expanding service expectations: Urgent care was no longer just acute care. The industry was expanding into preventive care, occupational health, behavioral health, telemedicine, and follow-up procedures. The client’s platform needed to support this broader scope.
A product roadmap driven by tactics, not strategy: Before the engagement, the client’s development priorities were driven by individual franchise owner feature requests — incremental EMR improvements, not strategic investment in the platform’s future.
The client recognized they needed a structured way to hear from their most strategic customers, understand the forces reshaping their industry, and align their platform investments with where urgent care was heading — not just where it had been.
The Approach
Timberwilde was engaged to design, build, and facilitate a Customer Advisory Board that would create a structured, recurring forum where the client’s most strategic customers could help shape the company’s direction — not just request features.
Phase 1: Program Architecture
Timberwilde designed a six-phase CAB framework built for durability, not just a single event:
Build the program: Define the CAB’s purpose, structure, and success metrics. The stated mission: capture customer and industry insights, feedback, and suggestions to improve the value, relevance, and customer experience of the client’s platform.
Recruit the board: Hand-select customers who were leaders, innovators, and disruptors in their respective organizations — the most strategic thinkers, not just the loudest voices or the biggest accounts.
Create the content: Design agendas that strike a balance between healthcare industry trends, customer priorities, and the client’s strategic needs. Not a product feedback session — a strategic dialogue.
Execute the program: A quarterly cadence of in-person and virtual meetings — in-person twice per year, virtual twice per year — designed to manage existing commitments while creating the time and space to drive new actions and outcomes.
Measure success: Track business growth, customer experience improvements, product and service innovation, competitive advantage, and board member engagement and satisfaction.
Sustain engagement: Foster an ongoing, mutually beneficial relationship between meetings — not a one-and-done exercise.
Phase 2: Board Composition
The advisory board comprised eight senior executives — CEOs, CIOs, Chief Revenue Officers, and Presidents — from urgent care organizations across the Central and East Coast United States. The composition was intentional: a cross-section of urgent care professionals from different organizational models, markets, and perspectives on where the industry was heading.
Phase 3: Facilitation — From Feature Requests to Innovation
The most important thing Timberwilde did was shift the conversation from tactical to strategic. The client had been asking franchise owners: “What features do you need in the EMR?” Timberwilde reframed the question entirely: “How do we design the next generation of urgent care — and how does every part of this ecosystem need to evolve to deliver it?”
To catalyze this shift, TCG brought in an outside innovation thought leader to one of the advisory board sessions and facilitated a structured ideation exercise to spark new thinking about disruption and innovation in urgent care. The session generated several concrete ideas that participating providers wanted to pilot and incubate over time — moving the conversation from “what should the software do?” to “what should this industry become?”
Phase 4: Three Sessions, One Strategic Arc
Gordon facilitated three CAB sessions over twelve months, each building on the last:
Session 1 (Nashville, March 2022): Established the foundational insight that the client’s platform was viewed by franchise owners not as just an EMR system but as the engine that enables what is possible in support of the patient journey. The board identified that the patient journey was evolving and nuanced, that client and provider culture must be at the center of the work, and that board member participation in the product and engineering process was essential.
Session 2 (Chicago, October 2022): Pushed into strategic territory: new, economically viable service offerings focused on “on-demand healthcare.” The board articulated the need for a “one system” approach to interoperability — agile and secure — and made the critical shift from tactical to strategic customer engagement as the foundation for the go-forward approach.
Session 3 (Miami, February 2023): Confirmed that the client was making significant platform investments focused on on-demand healthcare and client profitability. Interoperability, open standards, and systems integration were validated as critically important. The board affirmed that journey maps, strategic roadmap initiatives, and product process improvements provided the visibility and clarity they needed.
The arc across all three sessions tells a story of progressive strategic deepening: from “what is this platform?” to “what should this industry become?” to “how do we invest together to get there?”
The Solution
The advisory board program produced measurable impact across five categories, each demonstrating how structured customer engagement translates directly into business outcomes.
1. Product Roadmap Transformation
The CAB fundamentally changed how the client made product decisions:
Shifted the roadmap’s center of gravity from incremental feature requests to strategic investment in the patient and provider experience.
Brought strategic initiatives to light on the roadmap with clear visibility into why each project was being pursued. Product decisions became value-driven rather than request-driven.
Created new communication mechanisms for shifts in the roadmap, development priorities, and engineering efforts — giving franchise owners the transparency they had been missing.
Reorganized the company’s product management tools around the client perspective and Voice of Customer principles.
2. Telemedicine & Patient Access
The advisory board drove the client to invest in telemedicine capabilities that went far beyond video visits. New features were built into the EMR platform to make it easier for patients to connect and interact with clinicians. But the most meaningful impact was in access and equity:
Underserved communities: Telemedicine access was extended to people in underserved communities who previously had limited or no access to healthcare — transforming the platform from a clinic management tool into an access-to-care enabler.
Behavioral health: Given the surge in behavioral health cases, telemedicine became a meaningful pathway for mental health patients to receive both immediate episodic care and planned ongoing treatment. This opened an entirely new service dimension for the urgent care network.
3. Front-Desk Automation & Patient Experience
The advisory board’s most operationally radical recommendation — eliminating the traditional front-desk bottleneck — moved from concept to pilot:
Self-check-in via smart devices: Clinics began piloting patient self-check-in and related intake steps through mobile devices, allowing patients to complete registration, insurance verification, and arrival notification without front-desk assistance.
Resource reallocation: As the patient experience became more automated, urgent care managers could reallocate front-desk staff to other, higher-priority outcomes — improving both efficiency and care quality.
Predictive capacity modeling: The EMR platform incorporated predictive modeling to support clinicians' workloads based on clinic capacity, aligning staffing resources with predicted spikes in patient foot traffic. This moved the workforce model from reactive to anticipatory.
4. Operational Excellence
Beyond product and patient experience, the CAB drove improvements in how the client operated internally:
Process improvements within Product Management were directly influenced by CAB feedback on where to focus.
Software development lifecycle visibility: Board members participated in feedback that led to changes, providing more transparency into how software was planned, built, and released.
Documentation standards and tooling: Implementation of new standards and a product management tool to more effectively communicate project progress and roadmap planning.
5. Thought Leadership & Strategic Elevation
Timberwilde designed the CAB not just as a listening exercise but as a platform for strategic dialogue that elevated both the client and its customers:
Board of Directors perspectives: The client’s board shared its investment rationale and private equity industry trends, giving franchise owners an insider view of where capital was flowing.
Outside innovation thought leadership: Gordon brought in an external innovation speaker and facilitated an ideation session that generated pilot-ready concepts for next-generation urgent care.
Peer-to-peer knowledge sharing: Board members presented to each other on leveraging the platform to drive new revenue growth within their own businesses. Customers teaching customers — the highest form of platform advocacy.
6. Industry Landscape Framework
One of the most valuable outputs was a comprehensive mapping of ten industry trends — including telemedicine integration, expansion into new services, data analytics and AI, and the growing demand for urgent care — against five core constraints: cost, quality, access, workforce shortage, and regulatory complexity. This framework connected external market forces to internal strategy in a way the client had never formalized, and became the foundation for a multi-track customer engagement strategy: C-level summits for business strategy, technology advisory groups for platform direction, and industry events for broader ecosystem engagement.
What the CAB Revealed — Conditions for Growth
Beyond the operational and strategic outcomes, the advisory board surfaced important opportunities for the client to deepen its impact:
Opportunity for enhanced strategic relationships: The advisory board created a foundation of mutual partnership that opened the door to stronger, more strategic relationships across board member organizations. With this foundation in place, the client had the conditions to deepen its commitment to addressing specific customer needs and opportunities — moving from relationship quality to execution quality.
From operator mindset to strategic vision: Legacy approaches to customer engagement had encouraged an operator-level mindset focused on near-term fixes. What this board and community discovered was that vision-driven approaches were far more effective for driving innovative, forward-looking strategic discussions. The shift from tactical to strategic dialogue became one of the engagement’s most durable outcomes.
Consistency of personas and strategic priorities: Having the right personas at the right level, with consistent strategic priorities, emerged as the single most important variable in advisory board effectiveness. This insight shaped how future boards would be composed and how agendas would be designed.
These insights — delivered to the CEO and executive leadership team — created the conditions and opportunities to make the advisory board program and the client’s broader customer engagement strategy stronger with each iteration. The client’s response: further “stickiness” with urgent care owners, greater value realization from EMR investments, and innovation opportunities that are directly business-impacting.
Board Member Feedback
Post-engagement feedback from advisory board members consistently highlighted three themes:
Enhanced mutual partnership: Board members described a mutually enhanced relationship as a direct result of serving on the advisory board. The structured engagement created a foundation of trust and shared purpose that extended well beyond individual meetings.
Higher productivity toward shared strategic outcomes: The investment of time and resources led to measurably higher productivity toward the strategic outcomes both parties sought. Board members saw direct business value from their participation — not just relationship value.
Speed and efficiency across touchpoints: The strategic objectives and agendas — maintained between meetings and across multiple touchpoints — drove speed and efficiency in achieving intended results. The program’s quarterly cadence kept momentum alive without overwhelming participants.
Measurable Outcomes
Patient wait time reduction: 18–22% reduction across participating clinics.
Patient satisfaction: 10–12% improvement in patient satisfaction scores.
Clinician satisfaction: 5–8% improvement in clinician satisfaction scores.
Telemedicine expansion: New capabilities built into EMR: patient-clinician connectivity, underserved community access, behavioral health episodic and planned care.
Front-desk automation: Self-check-in via smart devices in pilot; front-desk staff reallocated to higher-priority outcomes.
Predictive modeling: EMR platform incorporated predictive clinician workload modeling based on clinic capacity.
Roadmap transformation: Product roadmap shifted from feature-request-driven to value-driven strategic investment.
Operational improvements: New documentation standards, product management tooling, and SDLC transparency.
Strategic framework: Formal framework and strawman proposal delivered to client leadership (under NDA).
Innovation pipeline: Structured ideation session generated multiple pilot-ready concepts for next-generation urgent care.
Customer retention: Increased “stickiness” with urgent care owners; greater value realization from EMR investments.
Board member feedback: Enhanced mutual partnership, higher productivity toward shared strategic outcomes, and increased speed and efficiency across touchpoints
Client Testimonials
“The advisory board was the first time our strategic priorities were genuinely shaping the platform’s direction. That changed the relationship entirely.”
— CEO, National Healthcare Organization“As a member of the advisory board, the conversations shifted from tactical to strategic and collaborative. It’s having a direct impact on our business, and our clinician and patient experiences.”
— Advisory Board Member“Great CAB meeting. GREAT CAB meeting. Boom.”
— Advisory Board Participant“Thank you for all of your hard work. It’s all the little things that go unnoticed in the background that take so much planning to have a smooth, successful advisory board.”
— Client StakeholderWhat Timberwilde Did
What the client had: the leading EMR platform in urgent care, a national franchise network, and growing demand for their services.
What the client couldn’t see: the gap between their product roadmap and where their industry was heading. The strategic insights their own customers were carrying but had no forum to share. The difference between feature requests and market intelligence.
What Timberwilde built: a structured advisory board program that transformed the client’s relationship with its most strategic customers from transactional to collaborative. Over three sessions and twelve months, the board shifted the product roadmap from reactive to strategic, drove telemedicine capabilities that expanded healthcare access to underserved communities and behavioral health patients, piloted front-desk automation that improved patient experience and freed staff for higher-value work, incorporated predictive modeling into the platform’s workforce management, and surfaced the conditions and opportunities that would make the client’s customer engagement strategy stronger with every iteration.
The results: 18–22% reduction in patient wait times. 10–12% improvement in patient satisfaction. 5–8% improvement in clinician satisfaction. And a platform company that evolved from a reactive EMR vendor to a visionary industry partner — because someone asked the bigger question.