Industry

Readers of JUCM News are painfully aware of downturns in urgent care patient visits throughout much of the COVID-19 pandemic. As testing supplies and now vaccines have become more readily available, and patients feel safer venturing to healthcare facilities, a healthy rebound is in effect at urgent care centers across the country. According to an article just published online by Modern Healthcare, however, hospital emergency rooms are having a tough time recouping the patients who …

The COVID-19 pandemic has put us all to a test. Urgent care operators have had to be creative in finding new approaches to offering care while keeping workers safe, and ensuring that patients have felt as comfortable as possible visiting when they need same-day medical attention. There’s a secondary price to pay for all that vigilance, though: The stress and fear that accompanied the pandemic have taken a toll on our collective mental and emotional …

Mask mandates, capacity limits, and social distancing suggestions are starting to fall by the wayside across the country, leading urgent care operators to reconsider operational changes they may have instituted at the height of the pandemic. As JUCM News readers know, many urgent care centers diverted patients to alternate locations so resources could be dedicated to COVID-19 testing or other related activities. Now, however, Western Sierra Medical Clinic in California, Fayetville Urgent Care in Arkansas, …

In the eyes of many, physician assistants and nurse practitioners (known collectively as advanced practice providers, or APPs) have become indispensable members of the urgent care clinical team. Given that they work under a lower pay scale than physicians, it’s possible for an urgent care operator to hire more APPs than physicians, thereby increasing the productivity of the practice without a corresponding jump in payroll—and reserving more of the physician’s time for the highest-acuity patients. …

For too long, urgent care was perceived as the ugly stepchild of various other practice settings—emergency medicine light, doc-in-a-box…pick your dismissive stereotype. Given the evolution of ownership structures since then, from entrepreneurial physicians to venture capitalists and major health systems, it shouldn’t be a surprise that a key metric—physician salaries—have actually started trending higher than some longer-established specialties. According to new data from the American Medical Group Association and published online as a slideshow by …

Anyone who works in urgent care and saw an industry article published recently under The Business Journals umbrella was probably taken aback by a headline that began Urgent Care Is Dead. Given that this was followed by Long Live Urgent Care, it seems the author of the headline was trading on the old expression The king is dead, long live the king for shock value. If you read the article, though, you were probably pleasantly …

A pair of not-for-profit consumer advocacy groups have renewed calls for the urgent care industry to be more regulated by the government, claiming that urgent care centers and retail clinics simply are not affordable for low-income patients, according to an article recently published by Modern Healthcare. The issue could be resolved, they say, if the government required these facilities to provide care for patients covered by Medicaid. As urgent care veterans know, the problem here …

The past year has brought nonstop changes in how Americans live their daily lives. What used to be typical behavior became foolhardy. People stopped going to doctors for nonemergent complaints to a large extent, with urgent care suffering downturns in patient volume (temporarily, though some practices are still trying to catch up). Bearing that in mind, the Urgent Care Association, of which JUCM is the official publication, in the interest of full disclosure, has adapted …

Utah state legislators just voted to expand physician assistants’ ability to practice without physician supervision. North Dakota did the same 2 years ago. While that’s clearly a nod to advanced practice providers’ essential role in administering healthcare, as well as a concession to the downturn in physicians choosing to practice primary care, there are concerns among some in the urgent care community that the trend toward recognizing care provided PAs and nurse practitioners on the …

A couple of years ago, stories of patients getting surprise bills from freestanding emergency rooms—often based on the mistaken presumption that they had actually visited an urgent care center—ran rampant. Legislation in various states reduced the risk of that happening, and urgent care centers did their part by taking great pains to differentiate themselves from freestanding ERs. However, now that COVID-19 testing has become both common and urgently necessary, patients are again getting stung by …