bnapolitano, Author at Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

New Research Sees Urgent Care Market Hitting $26 Billion by 2024

Projections on the ongoing—and increasing—growth of the urgent care market continue to build, with the latest data predicting it to exceed $26 billion by 2024 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23% in that 6-year period. Market Research Engine’s latest report, Urgent Care Center Market By Ownership (Corporate Owned, Physician Owned, Hospital Owned); By Services (Illness, Injury, Physical, Vaccination, Diagnostic, Screening) and by Regional Analysis—Global Forecast by 2017–2024, breaks down the industry by …

Suddenly, Massachusetts is a Battleground State for Urgent Care Legislative Issues

The Urgent Care Association (UCA) and the North East Regional Urgent Care Association (NERUCA) have stepped up their joint efforts to lobby against proposed legislation in Massachusetts that it says would wreak havoc not only on urgent care operators, but the entire state healthcare system. No longer content to simply urge interested parties to contact their legislators to make their feelings about the legislation known, both groups have gone a step further by staging a …

How To Add a Personal Touch to Your Urgent Care Practice

Urgent message: Traditional marketing and advertising only goes so far in building an urgent care practice. That’s why developing personal relationships with patients, staff, and other stakeholders is key to differentiating your practice, driving patient loyalty that results in repeat visits, and spurring positive word-of-mouth in your community. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc is Chief Executive Officer of Velocity Urgent Care and is Practice Management Editor of The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine Whoever said …

ACEP and Georgia Physicians File Suit Over Anthem ED Policy

Anthem’s policy of refusing to pay on nonemergent visits to the emergency room (after the fact, at their discretion) has moved the Medical Association of Georgia and the American College of Emergency Physicians to file a lawsuit in U.S. district court. The two groups hope to get the court to compel Anthem and subsidiary Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia to abandon the policy, which is intended to discourage patients from going to the emergency …

New Data Breach Exposed Information on 200,000+ Urgent Care Patients

It’s unclear whether human error or ill intent on the part of hackers is to blame, but on July 10 the records of more than 200,000 patients who had visited Premier Immediate Medical Care was exposed was “left exposed” for over a month on a practice management software server. The software provider, MedEvolve, says it is notifying current and former Premier patients that their names, billing addresses, telephone numbers, insurance status, and, for some, Social …

A 35-Year-Old Man with Thumb Pain After a Fall

Figure 1. The patient is a 35-year-old male who presents with a painful, swollen thumb. He stumbled over his daughter’s tricycle in the front yard hours ago, putting his hand out to break his fall. View the image taken and consider your next steps, along with possible diagnoses.

CDC Wants More Opioid Guidelines—but Will They Help?

Robert Redfield, MD took the reins at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the midst of a national explosion in opioid addiction and death. As such, he vowed that tackling the problem would be a top priority for the CDC. Right now, that means demanding that his agency set new guidelines for prescribing opioids for short-term pain and implementing new systems to track overdoses in hospital emergency rooms. However, a study conducted and …

Guard Patient Privacy Like You Would Your Own—or Face the Consequences

Prosecutions for relatively small-time violations of patient privacy under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) are becoming more common, in spite of the fact that larger-scale data breaches and fraud investigations grab all the headlines. One reason: Such violations may be low-hanging fruit that helps federal prosecutors win convictions more easily than more sweeping investigations. The HIPAA “privacy rule” sets standards to protect individuals’ medical records and other personal health information, requiring that …

UCF Study Seeks to Quantify Early Diabetes Detection in Urgent Care

It’s not all that unusual for patients to be diagnosed with diabetes in an urgent care center they’ve visited for unrelated complaints. The question is, how common or uncommon is it, and will knowing the answer to that question help urgent care providers be better prepared for such occurrences? We may have a better idea once the Urgent Care Foundation (UCF) finishes its study to measure the benefits of diabetes screening in urgent care. With …

Inappropriate Opiate Prescribing Has an Urgent Care Physician Facing Serious Time

The lure of padding his income by taking off-the-books cash from patients seeking illicit opiate medications was apparently too much for one urgent care physician; he just pled guilty in New Haven, CT federal court to charges of narcotics distribution. He also copped to healthcare fraud based on his practice of prescribing unnecessary opiates to patients who didn’t want or need them, some of whom never even ingested the medications. Many of them were enrolled …

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