UTIs don't keep office hours

A common assumption in outpatient care is that demand for a given condition concentrates during business hours. We tested whether that holds for uncomplicated urinary tract infections (UTIs) by measuring the timing of care requests submitted through Vyta.co across the hours of the day and the days of the week.

UTIs are also one of the most common reasons people seek outpatient care. According to the National Institutes of Health, they are the second most common type of infection in the body, and women develop them roughly four times as often as men. The Office on Women's Health reports that as many as 4 in 10 women who get a UTI will have another within six months. Demand on this scale is both large and recurring, which makes the practical question of when women seek care worth measuring directly.

Data and method

The analysis covers 213 UTI care requests submitted through Vyta.co between February and June 2026. For each request we use the timestamp at which it was initiated as a proxy for the moment a patient sought care, and we aggregate those timestamps by hour of day and by day of week.

Several limitations bound the interpretation:

• Sample size. 213 requests over four months is sufficient to characterize the overall distribution but not to support fine-grained segmentation. The reported percentages should be read as directional.
• Time zone. All request times are expressed in a single zone, U.S. Eastern Time (ET); they were not localized to each patient's local time zone. A request submitted from another zone is placed in the ET bin matching its absolute time, which can shift an individual request by one to two hours but does not change the aggregate pattern.
• Scope. The data reflect the women's UTI pathway only and exclude individuals who did not submit a request.

Request timing across the day

If care-seeking for UTIs concentrated during the workday, request volume would peak between roughly 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. and decline overnight. The observed distribution does not follow that shape. Volume is spread across all 24 hours, with a substantial fraction in the evening and overnight.

Overnight requests (8 p.m.–6 a.m.) account for 36% of the total. The lowest-volume interval is approximately 1 a.m. to 5 a.m., but volume in that window remains non-zero. The distribution does not track a conventional business schedule.

Request timing across the week

The same lack of concentration holds across days of the week. Request volume is approximately uniform from Monday through Sunday, and weekend volume is not materially lower than weekday volume. Saturday and Sunday together account for 26% of requests, close to the 29% of the week those two days represent.

A practice operating Monday through Friday is therefore unavailable on two of the seven days across which requests are distributed approximately evenly.

Implications for access

The central result is a comparison of two quantities. Standard weekday business hours (Monday–Friday, 8 a.m.–6 p.m.) constitute approximately 30% of the total hours in a week. In this dataset, those hours captured 32% of requests, a nearly identical share. This indicates that demand for UTI care is approximately uniform with respect to time, rather than concentrated during the workday.

This has a direct implication for access. When care is available only during business hours, the available window coincides with roughly one-third of the times at which patients submit requests; continuous availability covers the remaining two-thirds. The finding is descriptive rather than causal: it characterizes when requests are submitted, not why, and does not establish that all such requests are clinically appropriate for remote management.

Common questions