StuWilli, Author at Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Expanding Your Urgent Care Product Line with Massage Therapy, Aesthetics, and Body Sculpting

Expanding Your Urgent Care Product Line with Massage Therapy, Aesthetics, and Body Sculpting Urgent message: Maintaining not only growth but also profitability in the increasingly competitive urgent care marketplace requires a willingness to seek out and assess new services, and the wherewithal to offer those deemed to be a good fit for your business model. “Spa services” may be one such possibility warranting consideration. Michael F. Boyle MD, MBA, FACEP, Derrick Cooney, MD, and Keith …

The Dangers of Mistaking Metrics for Strategy

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. Urgent message: While metrics are essential for measuring a business strategy’s effectiveness, losing sight of the strategy in favor of a sole focus on the metrics carries the risk of undermining the very objective the strategy was meant to achieve. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” Or …

Next Up on the Evening News—Why Not You?

What do you think it would cost to get 6 minutes of exposure on television, demonstrating your clinical expertise by talking about a wide range of high-interest health topics? It’s actually a moot question, because a) you probably couldn’t afford it and b) if you’re the chief medical officer of Peachtree Immediate Care in Atlanta, you just got it for free. James Yost, MD sat down with one of the hosts of 11 Alive’s atl&co …

Primary Care Access is Waning; Those Patients Should Be Coming to Your Urgent Care Center

What has been mostly anecdotal over the past several years has now been confirmed by researchers from Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center: Fewer patients than ever are going to traditional primary care practices, meaning their patronage is up for grabs. Between 2002 and 2015, there was a 2% drop in the number of patients who have an established primary care provider. While younger patients, people of color, …

If Patients Can’t Park Near Your Clinic, They Won’t Be YOUR Patients for Long

A little boy bangs his toe on the coffee table while chasing his cat around the house. He’s screaming bloody murder and his mom is convinced he’s broken a bone. It’s a scenario tailor-made for urgent care, so she drives immediately to your clinic—only to find the only parking spot is across the street, in the municipal lot. Be assured she’s not parking there; nor is she going to circle until something opens up. She’s …

ECG Challenge: A 90-Year-Old Woman with Intermittent Lightheadedness

The patient is a 90-year-old woman who presents to urgent care with a 2-week history of intermittent lightheadedness. She denies syncope, chest pain, shortness of breath, diaphoresis, or focal neurological symptoms. Upon exam, you find: General: Alert and oriented X 3, sitting fully dressed in a chair Lungs: CTAB Cardiovascular: RRR without murmur, rub, or gallop Abdomen: Soft and NT, no pulsatile mass Ext: No peripheral edema, pulses are 2+ and equal in all extremities …

Walmart and Sam’s Club Lay Down Their Own Opioid Limits

Insurers, health systems, and state governments have cobbled together regulations on various aspects of prescriptions for opiates. The federal government is working on legislation aimed at curbing the opioid crisis, too. Walmart and Sam’s Club’s pharmacies aren’t waiting for new regulations to mandate the limits of opioid prescriptions, however. Instead, the parent company is imposing a limit of 7-days’ supply for patients who are prescribed opiates for acute, short-term pain. Those restrictions will start within …

Keeping Patients ‘In-House’ by Forging New Partnerships

Western Connecticut Medical Group (WCMG) and American Family Care (AFC) have entered into a collaborative partnership to provide coordinated patient care—or, put more plainly, to increase the odds of retaining patients who visit AFC’s urgent care locations within a defined follow-up path. The two companies have structured their arrangement so AFC patients who need follow-up will have improved access to primary and specialty care practices within WCMG. Traffic will be two-way, too; WCMG patients who need …

Failing to Collect ‘Small’ Unpaid Fees Adds Up—and Up, and Up

It would seem to be self-evident that your urgent care center needs to collect on all fees for care provided in order to stay in business. Whether by sloppy bookkeeping, honest mistakes, or well-intentioned attempts at “charity,” however, millions of dollars are going unclaimed for services rendered across the country, according to an editorial that appeared in the Chicago Tribune recently. The opinion piece, penned by the paper’s Editorial Board, goes so far as to …

Make a Charitable Donation, Get a Free Camp Physical

When is a free physical not free, but still a bargain? When the true cost is a donation—in any amount the patient chooses—to a charity for children. That’s the deal New England Urgent Care is offering at its West Hartford, CT location for the next couple of weeks. They’ll conduct physicals for children who need one before they can go to summer camp, waiving their normal fee in exchange for a donation of any amount …

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