Practice Management
A new Kaiser Family Foundation analysis ranking states according to the number of emergency department (ED) visits found that West Virginia had the highest number of ED visits (596 per 1,000), while Nevada had the fewest (226 per 1,000) in 2023. The organization analyzed the most recent available community hospital data from the 1999-2023 American Hospital Association Annual Survey and compared it to population reports from the Census Bureau. Below are the top 10 states …
Read More
Legislation in 2022 sought to expand access to the opioid use disorder treatment drug buprenorphine by eliminating previous caps on the number of patients a prescribing provider could manage and by eliminating prescriber waiver requirements. At the same time, pharmacists with prescribing authority were permitted to directly prescribe the medication without a collaborative agreement with a physician, although state-specific restrictive criteria could still apply. As a result of these changes, there was a significant increase …
Read More
This month, Amazon engineered a significant restructuring of its healthcare leadership, reorganizing its Amazon Health Services division into 6 new business units. This overhaul was designed to simplify the structure of the large Amazon healthcare operation following a period of executive departures. In terms of clinical care delivery, Amazon’s One Medical offers membership-based services with a targeted focus on employer groups with same-day appointments and virtual care. Across the country, One Medical currently partners with …
Read More
A new study suggests there has been a rise in higher acuity coding across certain outpatient services. Among urgent care centers, the proportion of visits coded at higher complexity levels (CPT 99204 and 99205) increased overall from 34.0% in 2018 to 40.6% in 2023, while visits coded at level 1 (CPT 99202) declined from 9.5% to 2.9% over the same period. The most significant increases in high-intensity coding were observed in cases involving “blood and …
Read More
A recent federal budget proposal that’s floating around Washington sketches out plans to eliminate parts of the Health Resources and Services Administration and its Federal Office of Rural Health Policy (FORHP), according to a JAMA Network news article. A provisional budget outline specifically mentions eliminating 4 rural health programs meant to sustain critical access hospitals in distress with a 25% cut for FORHP’s budget in fiscal year 2026. The impact of the cuts could be …
Read More
When Cleveland Clinic announced a new policy beginning on June 1 that requires patients to pay their out-of-pocket copays when they arrive for their scheduled appointments, it created controversy for the high-profile nonprofit system. If a patient isn’t able to pay upon check-in for nonemergent appointments, it results in the appointment being cancelled. Urgent care is not included in the new policy, so patients visiting any of the Cleveland Clinic’s 42 centers will not need …
Read More
A new survey of U.S. adults 50 aged years and older conducted in February by AARP further underscores the value of urgent care’s convenient access for communities. More than 80% of the 1,012 American adults sampled say there is an urgent care in their community, and 48% say they live within 10 minutes of an urgent care center. Another 27% say urgent care is 11-15 minutes away, 17% say it’s 16-30 minutes away, and just …
Read More
Northwell Health this week announced the completion of its acquisition of Nuvance Health, resulting in the establishment of an integrated regional health system serving the greater New York and Connecticut areas. This new nonprofit entity will serve a combined population of about 13 million consumers with an annual budget of $22.6 billion and a workforce of more than 104,000 employees, including 22,000 nurses and 13,500 providers. The deal brings the network up to 28 hospitals, …
Read More
Over the past few weeks, glucagon-like peptide-1 agonist (GLP-1) drug manufacturers Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk have been sending cease and desist notices to providers that are still advertising generic, compounded versions of their brand name diabetes and weight loss drugs. A shortage of GLP-1 drugs temporarily allowed compounding pharmacies to produce their own versions, but now with the shortage over, the pharmacies must stop and return to filling prescriptions with the manufacturers’ branded products. …
Read More
The Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota has established the Vaccine Integrity Project to offer vaccine recommendations and to review safety and effectiveness data, according to a press release. The project is guided by public health and policy experts—some of which served in previous positions at the Food and Drug Administration and the National Academy of Medicine—who will offer strategies to leverage scientific evidence for vaccine-related practices. To …
Read More