• Mia Minen, Kina Zhou, Ramona Lall, and Benjamin W Friedman.
• Department of Neurology and Population Health, NYU Langone Health, New York, New York.
• Pain Med. 2020 Oct 1; 21 (10): 2458-2464.

ObjectiveIncreasingly, patients are seeking same-day care at urgent care (UC) facilities. Little is known about the health care utilization patterns of patients who visit UC facilities for headache and migraine. We examined the frequency of headache and migraine visits and revisits at UC facilities.MethodsWe conducted a retrospective cohort study of headache not otherwise specified (NOS) and migraine visits from 67 NYC UC facilities over an eight-month period. We report descriptive analyses, the frequency of headache NOS revisits, and the elapsed time to revisits.ResultsThere were 10,240 patients who visited UC facilities for headache NOS or migraine within the eight-month period. The majority of patients, 6,994 (68.3%), were female, and the mean age (SD) was 35.1 (15.0) years. Most (93.9%) patients (N = 9,613) lived within 60 miles of NYC; 5.5% (N = 564) had at least one revisit, and among re-visitors, there was an average (SD) of 2.2 (0.7) visits to UC facilities during the study period and an average time to revisit (SD) of 61.3 (55.2) days.ConclusionsIn just eight months, there were >10,000 headache NOS and migraine visits to UC facilities in NYC, with half of revisits occurring within 90 days. Future work should examine headache management in UC facilities.© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Academy of Pain Medicine. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

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