Practice Management
As the weather turns warmer and schools start letting out, urgent care centers can expect to see more patients presenting with certain illness and injuries—some of which can be deadly. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just issued a report noting there were 493 outbreaks of waterborne diseases—many of them related to recreational waters—between 2000 and 2014, including 27,219 illnesses and eight fatalities. Up to a third of the outbreaks could be traced back …
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Concerns over the lifetime consequences of head injuries have led to countless protocols and regulations for athletes and victims of accidents or falls. Advances are being made on the clinical front, too—some of which may light the way for urgent care to play a bigger role. First, a study just published in JAMA Network Open suggests that patients who presented to emergency rooms with what was ultimately found to be mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) …
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We’ve shared research showing that certain over-the-counter pain medications can be as effective as opioid medications for acute pain before. Now a study conducted by the School of Dental Medicine at Case Western Reserve University School offers new data indicating the same is true for dental pain. Researchers found that ibuprofen and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, either alone or in combination with acetaminophen, are actually more effective than opioids for many patients when it comes …
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Cases of hepatitis A—some of them fatal—continue to spread across the country, confounding local and federal health officials. Fourteen states (Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New York, Rhode Island, Utah, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin) are the latest to report higher-than-average hep A activity. At least 1,200 cases have been reported nationwide since March 2017, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared the outbreak; 40 of those patients died as …
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A new report published in The Lancet indicates that many patients presenting to multiple practice settings with lower back pain (LBP) receive less than optimal care, as evidenced by the fact that their symptoms often linger for up to a year. Perhaps worse, some are still prescribed opiates despite multiple studies showing they’re not the best choice for LBP, and they leave patients at increased risk for addiction. Pooling guidelines from the U.S., United Kingdom, …
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No sooner do we close the books on one of the worst flu seasons in recent history than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells us to expect a high volume of tick-, mosquito-, and flea-borne infections as the weather warms up. It’s not just greater numbers of the same diagnoses, either; new tickborne diseases like Heartland virus are showing up in the continental U.S. Tickborne diseases are climbing most in the Northeast, Upper …
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Chronic pain patients who completed a comprehensive, multidisciplinary pain rehabilitation program used significantly fewer healthcare resources in a study presented at the American Academy of Pain Medicine’s 2018 annual meeting. The only exception was in behavioral health, in which access increased. Over the course of the 3-week program, patients with chronic (≥3 months) noncancer pain were able to access physical, occupational, and medical therapies and taper the doses of opioids prescribed to them. Researchers analyzed …
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Updates to pain guidelines in the era of opioid addiction have focused on treatment of chronic pain, generally. The latest edict takes a close look at the practice of prescribing narcotic medications for acute pain, however—a subject all the more relevant to the urgent care provider. Improving the Safety of Opioid Use for Acute Noncancer Pain in Hospitalized Adults: A Consensus Statement from the Society of Hospital Medicine recommends limiting the use of opioids to …
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A new report published online in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vital Signs reveals that the CDC and health departments across the country identified more than 220 instances of germs with “unusual” antibiotic-resistant genes last year. Anne Schuchat, MD, principal deputy director of the CDC, called it “reassuring” that the resistant bacteria were identified because that’s the first step toward finding new ways to kill them. The report also notes that one in four germ …
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may have spoken too soon when it declared the 2017–2018 influenza season to be on the wane. Now the agency says cases are mounting—though right now it’s influenza B, not the H3N2, A strain that is both more severe and less receptive to vaccines. In fact, with the week ending March 17 influenza B has usurped influenza A as the most dominant strain of the moment. It’s not …
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