What You Should Know
- Concierge immediate and urgent care network Sollis Health published a comprehensive decade-long trend study, The Real Cost of Healthcare for Americans, that synthesizes national health economics research with ten years of proprietary internal patient utilization data.
- Quantifies the macroeconomic “Time Tax” across U.S. healthcare delivery: travel and waiting times alone cost American patients and employers an estimated $89 billion in lost economic value annually.
- Evaluates severe door-to-door clinic inefficiencies: the typical American medical encounter consumes 121 minutes total, with a mere 20 minutes spent in direct clinical dialogue with a physician.
The Access Gap: Sollis Benchmarks vs. Legacy Infrastructure
The report combines national macroeconomic healthcare research with a decade of proprietary patient encounter data from Sollis’ network to analyze the clinical, financial, and behavioral fallout of systemic healthcare wait times. The report contrasts traditional delivery timelines with Sollis’ private immediate care model:
- Door-to-Doctor Velocity: Sollis members wait an average of 3 to 3.5 minutes to be seen by an emergency medicine physician, spending 90% of their total visit face-to-face with a clinician (compared to the national average of 20 minutes).
- Expedited Specialty Navigation: The platform coordinates specialist appointments up to five times faster than national baselines:
- Dermatology: 6 days at Sollis vs. 36 days nationally.
- OB/GYN: 7 days at Sollis vs. 42 days nationally.
- Cardiology: 8 days at Sollis vs. 33 days nationally.
- Orthopedics: 10 days at Sollis vs. 40 days nationally.
- On-Demand Utilization & Care Delivery: 88% of Sollis visits are scheduled same-day, with 64% of new member accounts utilizing care within their first 30 days.
- After-Hours & Virtual Triage: Encounter volume reflects demand outside 9-to-5 clinic schedules, with 40% of encounters occurring during off-hours (nights, weekends, holidays), 66% of pediatric visits taking place outside school hours, and 47% of members utilizing virtual care over the past year.
Clinical Diversion & Financial Impact
The report examines the downstream clinical and operational consequences of replacing standard emergency departments:
- Hospital ED Diversion: Supported by more than 100 emergency medicine physicians across 14 state-of-the-art facilities in New York, Northern California, Southern California, and Florida, fewer than 1% of Sollis encounters require escalation or transfer to a hospital emergency department.
- Emergency Department Financial Exposure: Nationally, the median out-of-pocket ER bill sits at $2,715 even with commercial insurance coverage, leading 57% of insured Americans to enter the emergency room with no price transparency regarding final liability.
- Member Advocacy: Over its 10-year operating history, Sollis has scaled to serve 20,000 active members while maintaining a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 80—more than double the national healthcare industry average of 38.
Strategic Rationale: The Consumerization of Acute Care Access
The findings published by Sollis highlight a structural dynamic across the health-tech and provider access landscape:
- The High Cost of Access Failure: When healthcare organizations fail to solve front-end access, patients either defer chronic and acute symptoms until they require emergency interventions or abandon traditional health system networks altogether.
- The “Time Tax” Driving Alternative Delivery: Sollis’ data shows that Americans lose the equivalent of an entire eight-hour workday every month coordinating healthcare logistics for their households. High-net-worth and consumer-directed segments are increasingly opting out of legacy ambulatory booking systems in favor of membership-based concierge models that guarantee immediate, friction-free clinical encounters.
- Parallels to Front-Office AI Automation: This data mirrors why health systems are spending heavily on front-office AI platforms (like Parakeet Health and EliseAI). Whether through automated conversational booking engines or dedicated physical concierge hubs, the primary objective is the same: close the 31-day wait gap and convert unmet patient demand into timely clinical encounters before conditions escalate or patients leak out-of-network.
To see the full report, visit https://www.sollishealth.com/pdfs/sollistrendreport.
