Practice Management
Whether an urgent care can bill Place of Service -19 or -22 requires an understanding of the criteria enabling facility code sets. An urgent care joint venture between physicians and a hospital recently inquired about using Place of Service 22 (Outpatient Hospital), enabling facility fees. The key with billing the urgent care as “outpatient hospital” is that it must truly qualify for that service. I have reservations as to whether the urgent care could bill …
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Just weeks ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed there had been more than 2,300 cases of mumps confirmed around the country—more than twice the number that occurred in all of 2015. Today there are over 2,000 under investigation in Arkansas alone, with several other states still reporting higher-than-average outbreaks. Urgent care clinicians in college towns should be aware that campuses in affected areas have been especially hard hit. The University of Missouri …
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A swell of evidence shows more and more that the way patients make choices about healthcare—and even access care—is changing constantly. About 5% of Google searches are for a health-related topic these days, and a Pew Research Center study found 62% of patients have used their smartphones to look up health-related information. And the Mayo Clinic estimates that 84% of patients want to partner with their physicians in making treatment decisions. In other words, patients …
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When an urgent care physician suggests that a patient see another clinician for follow-up care, patients usually take that advice, according to a study by the Uniersity of Minnesota and Urgent Care Partners. In fact, 66% not only took the doctor’s advice to seek further care, but went to the specific provider recommended (though a specific provider was recommended just 21% of the time). Overall, 76% of patients who were told to seek follow-up care …
Read MoreThe following chart, based data from a Practice Velocity study of more than 20,000,000 patient visits over a 5-year period, shows that urgent care exhibits a strong pattern of seasonality. The average daily visits in each month vary from average daily visits over the course of a year. For example, on an average day in July, there are 14% fewer patients than the baseline number, whereas in an average day in December, there are 25% …
Read MoreQ. I understand that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has added National Correct Coding Initiative (NCCI) edits that no longer allow the billing of debridement with hundreds of surgical codes. What is the impact? How do NCCI edits affect us in general? A. NCCI edits define when two procedure codes may not be reported together except under special circumstances. Medicare implemented NCCI to promote national correct coding methodologies and to control improper coding, …
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Case A mother brings her 10-year-old son to an urgent care center with a fever, conjunctival injection, and pharyngitis. She points out a smooth papule on his face that developed over the last few days. She says that he played with some kittens at a friend’s house about a week earlier, and she wonders if maybe he is extremely allergic to cats, because he has been rubbing his eyes ever since. View the image taken …
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Case An 80-year-old woman presents to an urgent care center with left hip pain that she has had for 4 years but that has worsened in the last week. She reports that before the pain worsened, she had gone on a long walk with her grandson. The pain is worse with movement through the range of motion. She has taken ibuprofen, but it did not reduce her pain. She says that she has not had …
Read MoreSean M. McNeeley, MD Azithromycin May Not Be Helpful for Asthma Key point: There is no proven benefit from taking azithromycin for asthma. Citation: Johnston SL, Szigeti M, Cross M, et al; AZALEA Trial Team. Azithromycin for acute exacerbations of asthma: the AZALEA randomized clinical trial. JAMA Intern Med. 2016;176:1630–1637. The randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial reported here focused on treatment for 3 days for 199 adults with asthma exacerbations. One group received 500 mg of …
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