Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

ChoiceOne Teams with Gwinnett Medical in Georgia

ChoiceOne Urgent Care is joining Gwinnett Medical Center to bring a new network of urgent care facilities to Gwinnett County, Georgia residents. In addition to standard urgent care, they will offer occupational medicine, vaccinations, sports physicals, and lab services in order to give patients immediate options short of a visit to the emergency room. ChoiceOne says they will also focus on continuity of care by partnering with Gwinnett Medical primary care providers and specialists, even …

Let Your Patient Base Know Urgent Care is Less Costly

Healthcare costs are proving to be the ruin of too many people in the U.S., highlighting the need for urgent care to present itself as a viable, high-quality alternative to budget-breaking trips to the emergency room. Facts: Medical bankruptcy, which affects 2 million people, has become the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S., and roughly 20% of adults have trouble affording medical care, according to NerdWallet.com. With as many as eight out of …

One Year In, Latino-focused Clinic Doubles in Size

Identifying and providing care for an underserved population may hold untold benefits for urgent care operators. In the case of Cliníca Médicos in Chattanooga, TN, that meant focusing on Spanish-speaking residents. Now the clinic is about to double in size just one year after opening its doors. The original mission was to offer healthcare services to area Latinos, regardless of insurance status. Patient volume has risen every month since, to the point that the clinic now …

Can Urgent Care Help Abate Astronomical Spike in Health Costs?

Families in the U.S. could be spending up to 45% of their household income on healthcare costs within the next two decades, according to a new study from the Pioneer Institute of Boston. The best-case scenario, according to the report, would be that health-insurance premiums rise by 4% annually, along with the same rate of increase for out-of-pocket costs. By 2035, those expenses would consume nearly a quarter of the family’s budget, up from 16% in …

‘Patient Experience’ Trend May Favor Urgent Care

Healthcare payment reform may be giving urgent care a leg up on the local emergency room, according to a new white paper from Press Ganey. While positive “patient experience” scores enable hospitals to collect greater reimbursement, tight margins require sharper focus on clinical care than ever before. In addition, pressure to keep household expenses down is pushing many patients (ie, customers) to consider their options more carefully, especially for lower-acuity complaints like those tailor-made for …

Make More Profitable Billing Practices a New Year Resolution for 2016

It’s not news that operating margins can be very thin—making it all the more perplexing that so many practices leave money on the table by not billing or coding correctly. While the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has said it will not deny claims for incorrect codes during the first year following implementation of ICD-10 in October 2015, provided that submitted codes are within the right code family, that’s only the tip of the …

Urgent Care Is a Win for Net Lease Transactions

In a relatively down year in the single-tenant net lease medical sector, urgent care centers continue to pique more interest than other healthcare properties. (A net lease is one in which the tenant pays all expenses of the property—property taxes, common areas, building maintenance, and utilities—as if they owned it.) The Boulder Group, an investment real estate services firm, reports that in the third quarter of 2015 cap rates in the medical sector compressed, while …

Urgent Care Centers Stand to Gain and Lose When New ACA Rule Takes Effect

Come January 1, the latest provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to go into effect will require companies that employ 50–99 people to offer acceptable health coverage to at least 95% of their full-time workers. Since that would include many urgent care centers, it’s likely that some operators will see their healthcare spending go up. However, savvy marketers will seize on the opportunity to demonstrate the value of their occupational medicine services to local …

WellSpan, MedExpress Strike Micro Partnership

WellSpan Health continues to broaden its reach into urgent care, this time striking a partnership with MedExpress—somewhat unusual in that it involves just a single clinic and reflects no change in ownership for either company. WellSpan has been slowly buying up healthcare properties in the area, having acquired Good Samaritan Health System in Lebanon, PA and brought a local orthopedic practice into its fold earlier this year. WellSpan Health is a large integrated healthcare system …

ACP’s take on concierge medicine

Urgent care operators considering adding a concierge medicine component to their business may find rationale to do so—or not to do so—in a new position paper published in the November 10 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. The paper declines to give either a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down to direct patient contracting practices (DPCPs)—aka “concierge medicine”—but does offer perspective on the pros and cons relative to medical quality, cost, access, and other factors. On the …