Free Advice

Free Advice

Members of the Urgent Care Association (UCA) get a lot of “free” stuff—resources, checklists, podcasts, job searches, magazines, webinars, templates, plans, and so on. But this year at the Urgent Care Convention we are going one better (two, actually). I’m talking about our new “Ask a Consultant” sessions and our Quality Programs Center, both of which essentially provide the space for free consulting (yes, free). The Ask a Consultant sessions feature top, vetted consultants who …

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What’s In It For Me?

What’s In It For Me?

Do you remember what it was like in the summer of 2020? If that summer had a theme, it would have been “overlooked.” Everyone was jumping up and down and waving their arms to get the attention of suppliers, government agencies, payers, diagnostic companies, and pharmaceutical companies so we could meet the needs of the patients literally lining up in front of our centers. We had to fight for every single thing we got, and …

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Recharge Your Batteries

Recharge Your Batteries

“Driving Change” is our overarching convention theme that we build on each year. When you are busy Driving Change in healthcare delivery, there aren’t a lot of breaks. In just the normal day-to-day of Urgent Care, you are anticipating, meeting, and exceeding the needs of your patients. You are doing the same for your occupational medicine employer customers. You are doing the same for your colleagues. You are doing the same for your strategic partners. …

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A Love Letter

A Love Letter

Dear Urgent Care, I remember the day we first met. It was a long-ago Christmas Eve early in the morning, and I had awakened with a terribly sore throat. I was despondent, knowing no one would be willing to take care of me on the holiday, which meant it wouldn’t be a very merry one for me. Then, there you were. In a brick building on a well-traveled highway, your lights were on and your …

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Keeping an Eye on Scope Creep

Keeping an Eye on Scope Creep

I’m assuming you saw news stories last month with headlines like this: “Walmart and Other Drug Stores Want to Help You Skip Trips to the Doctor.” Walmart Health is set to open 28 new locations in the coming year. Consumers can get testing and treatment for strep, flu, and COVID-19 at a Walmart pharmacy in 12 states, at Walgreens in 13 states, and at CVS in 10 states. Rite Aid is working on it, too. …

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The Fights We Can Win

The Fights We Can Win

Click Here to download the article PDF There’s been a lot of deep thinking around here lately. The questions we’ve been pondering have been with us for a long time, but often the answers don’t fully emerge when we want them to. They emerge when the moment is right. And sometimes, it takes new questions, or the same questions asked in a different way at a slightly different time or by a different person, for …

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Differential Competitive Advantage

Differential Competitive Advantage

In the May issue of JUCM, Josh Russell wrote in his Letter from the Editor-in-Chief about thinking differently about follow-up. If you are not a physician, physician assistant or nurse practitioner and decided to skip his letter that month because it seemed too clinical, I urge you to go back and read it. One of the aspects of Urgent Care that separates us from other kinds of healthcare operations—or used to—is the tight collaboration between …

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Downtime

Downtime

It’s a weird time right now, isn’t it? On one hand, visit volumes seem to be back to our pre-COVID “norms.” This should be business-as-usual to us, but it feels scary because everyone got used to volumes being so high for so long. On the other hand, everyone is short-staffed, so it’s a good thing we aren’t busier, but being short-staffed is also scary because we feel unprepared for the coming months when volumes go …

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The Best Time to Plant a Tree

The Best Time to Plant a Tree

Click Here to download the PDF. Urgent Care is definitely ready to start Driving Change again. The pandemic taught us how to be in crisis-response mode all day every day, to roll with wave after wave after wave of external changes, to constantly pivot and adapt, to maintain a furious pace because our communities needed us to. It also diminished opportunities to improve other skills—longer-term thinking, broader-scope planning, finer-tuning on quality improvement, better team development, …

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