Practice Management
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) says patients reporting to emergency rooms in Maryland are likely to wait over twice as long as the national average—53 minutes vs 22 minutes. Greater Baltimore Medical Center (BMBC), whose ED clocked an average wait time of 60 minutes, suggested patients could get in and out much more efficiently if nonemergent patients sought care in a more appropriate environment, such as BMBC’s primary care offices. This echoes …
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A pilot program in Prince George’s County, Maryland has trained firefighters responding to 911 calls from patients who don’t meet the criteria for true emergent care. In one case cited in a Washington Post article, responders checked on a woman who was in the habit of calling 911 several times a week, with an unnecessary (and costly) trip to the emergency room following most often before the program launched. On that day, though, she had …
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Carena, a virtual urgent care center in Seattle, has gained a healthy following among brick-and-mortar urgent care clinics around the country by “seeing” patients with fairly typical complaints like rashes and symptoms of bladder infections. The company reports that their lines are really jumping now that flu season is in full force. They, and other e-medicine providers, can’t offer flu shots, of course, but they can help patients who don’t have the flu avoid exposure …
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Recognizing the wisdom of offering patients a wider variety of options than primary care or the emergency room, more hospital systems are extending their brands to urgent care by entering into joint ventures with urgent care operators, or creating new urgent care centers of their own. The media are taking notice, too; a new article in Modern Healthcare details the investments MultiCare Health System, based in Tacoma, WA and Northwell Health of New Hyde Park, …
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Urgent care centers are distinct from emergency rooms by virtue of the amount of time patients can expect to wait, cost, and the acuity of care offered. A federal court in Rhode Island determined that, at least in one case, they can be held to the same requirements of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) as hospital emergency departments, though. Friedrich, et al v South County Hospital Healthcare System, et al centered …
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The Urgent Care Association’s annual Benchmarking Report reveals these are boom times for the urgent care industry. The number of centers in the U.S. is up 10% from the previous year (to 7,357); 96% of urgent care centers saw more patients in 2015 than in 2014; and 92% of centers kept wait times to ≤30 minutes. Best of all, nine out of 10 centers expect continued growth, with many also saying they’re extending the services …
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Ochsner Health System has enriched its urgent care and occupational medicine holdings by buying Millennium Healthcare Management (MHM). The deal includes MHM’s 12 urgent care centers—nearly doubling the number of locations Ochsner will have in southeast Louisiana, to 25—and four occupational health clinics. Ochsner, one of the first companies to open urgent care centers in the region after Hurricane Katrina, has treated roughly 135,000 patients among its facilities annually.
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Regardless of the setting in which they practice, urgent care clinicians play a crucial role in emergency medicine, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians—so much so that AAFP officially renamed one of its subgroups the Member Interest Group Emergency Medicine/Urgent Care (MIG EM/UC). In a new review article published in the current issue of Annals of Family Medicine, Banks, et al note that a “persistent shortages of residency-trained emergency physicians” creates a need …
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An expected holiday rush moved Baptist Health Madisonville (Alabama) to implore area residents to try urgent care for medical needs that might not warrant a trip to its emergency room. Kristy Quinn, the hospital’s marketing and public relations director, says high traffic times like the early-winter holidays make it difficult for the hospital to treat low-acuity cases that could be handled safely in the urgent care setting. “If people can evaluate what they are coming …
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The growth of telemedicine in urgent care and other settings is helping feed greater access to nurse practitioners and physician assistants. Relaxed scope of practice laws in both red and blue states, as well as evolving digital health technology that exploits the popularity of smartphones and tablets, make it easier and less expensive for patients to connect online—a model that typically employs NPs and PAs under the supervision of an on-site physician. This is further …
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