Practice Management
Code 3 is gambling that opening a pair of acute care facilities at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (DFW)—an urgent care center and a separate freestanding emergency room—will help profits soar. However, some industry experts are skeptical that the airport has the right stuff. Code 3 says the clinic should open in August, while the goal for the ED is to open by the end of the year. While urgent care centers in airport locations are …
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Typically, going to the emergency room costs a lot more than a trip to an urgent care center for the same complaint. You’d think insurers would be invested in getting their plan members to recognize the difference and make informed decisions accordingly. The chief medical officer of Innovation Health agrees, and revealed a “decision tree” to help patients choose wisely—and economically. Sunil Budhrani, MD, an emergency room doctor for close to 20 years who went …
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Urgent care and hospital operator Sutter Health is diversifying its efforts to reach patients in multiple settings by opening its own retail-style walk-in clinics in the Sacramento, CA area. Sutter already operated a few retail clinics housed in Rite Aid stores, along with dozens of urgent care centers. Now they’ve opened three such locations of their own in neighborhood shopping centers, with plans to open nine more in the San Francisco Bay area this summer. …
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A telemedicine ambulance triage system is helping to keep nonemergent cases out of the emergency room in Houston—perhaps indicating one more way urgent care could contribute to improving access to affordable, quality care for patients with non–life-threatening concerns. A briefing on Advisory Board notes that the city’s ED wait times were among the worst in the country 10 years ago, thanks to up to 50% of patients, in effect, seeking primary care in their local …
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New data suggest that efforts to educate patients on when it’s appropriate to go to an urgent care center vs the emergency room need to continue, if not increase. Basically, the survey from CityMD shows too many are not selecting the appropriate setting for immediate care. More than 2,000 Americans 18 and older were asked which setting would be most appropriate for immediate care in eight separate scenarios, from having a child with a 104⁰ …
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The Urgent Care Association (UCA) has petitioned Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price, MD to delay implementation of Stage 3 of the Meaningful Use program, as well as “Stage 3-like” measures in the MIPS program, indefinitely. UCA joined with 15 other organizations in crafting a letter that also requested that eligible clinicians not be required to move to EHR technology certified to the 2015 edition. Release of proposed requirements for MIPS and APMs …
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A new Cochrane Database review finds that while there’s a lot of chatter about the success of retail clinics, hard data on their effectiveness has yet to materialize. Chen et al, searched CENTRAL, MEDLINE, Embase, and six other databases, as well as two trial registers, and conducted reference checking and citations searching, looking for any trials and controlled before–after studies. While they acknowledge “retail clinics have become popular alternatives to traditional physician offices and emergency …
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The next decade will see national health expenditures grow 5.6% annually, according to projections from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), ensuring that the need for cost-effective, high-quality care will continue to grow as well. If CMS’s Office of the Actuary is correct in its estimate, the jump in healthcare spending will outpace projected growth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 1.2%. The portion of the GDP consumed by healthcare spending is …
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Guests at Hawai‘i’s Royal Kona Resort don’t have to go too far or enlist Google to find a doctor if they get a toxic dose of the sun or need a jellyfish sting looked at. The hotel offers guests the convenience of seeing a physician from DOCNow Virtual Healthcare Centers right in their own room (or the lobby or even the poolside bar) every day of the year, from 8 am to 9 pm. It …
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A South Carolina hospital group is the latest institution to try to cash in on urgent care’s growing appeal, by franchising four urgent care facilities in the upstate region. Bon Secours St. Francis will brand its “new” properties Bon Secours Express Care, in concert with the one urgent care location it has in Greenville, SC. A new article published in the GSA Business Report, an online journal covering various industries in South Carolina, cites data …
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