Practice Management
Name a rapidly expanding healthcare industry offering care that’s convenient, fast, and relatively low cost. “Urgent care” is the easy answer, so if you said “telemedicine” you get bonus points. National Business Group (NBG) predicted months ago that employers would continue warming to the idea and that many more would start offering telemedicine benefits; now it’s confirmed that 74% are doing so, up from 48% just last year. NBG also broke down what employers value …
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Offering cost savings vs higher-acuity settings and getting patients in and out the door quickly are primarily responsible for the ongoing rapid growth of the urgent care market, according to a new market report from Transparency Market Research (TMR). “The service time…[is] better than in an emergency department. Additionally, the fee per visit paid by a patient, whether with health insurance or not, in urgent care centers is much lower than the fee paid in …
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Industry insiders have watched accountable care organizations (ACOs) thrive at the expense of smaller practices—including more than a few urgent care centers. Now one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, also known as “Obamacare”), which laid the foundation for the ACOs, is having second thoughts. Bob Kocher, MD, who as a special assistant to President Obama helped shape the ACA, writes in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece that in spite of …
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If it seems like freestanding emergency rooms are popping up everywhere, try driving through a less-tony zip code. Researchers from Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital found growth of the ERs is concentrated in high-income areas with growing populations, more traditional ERs, a higher proportion of privately insured patients and a lower proportion of Medicaid beneficiaries. That leaves lower-income patients who need immediate care stuck waiting in the hospital emergency room, even if their complaints are …
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The American College of Physicians (ACP) says cost sharing—deductibles, in particular—may be leading patients to delay even medically necessary services, leaving the door open for urgent care to make its case to cash-paying customers seeking a middle ground. In “Addressing the Increasing Burden of Health Insurance Cost Sharing,” ACP makes five recommendations for making cost sharing more “equitable” in the private market, mainly by reducing overall health care spending, designing insurance plans that allow access …
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The first stop for many patients in search of a physician is their health plan’s provider directory. If a new study published in Health Affairs is any indication, though, they might be better off consulting Google—or even the yellow pages—to find their closes urgent care center for prompt attention. The problem is that directories are often inaccurate, with roughly 30% of callers discovering the physician has a specialty other than the one listed in the …
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Insurers and other parties who hold a stake in the economics of urgent care tend to respond to cold hard data. Here’s some: Seven of the top 10 reasons patients sought care in a freestanding emergency room in 2014 could have been treated safely—but much less expensively—in an urgent care center, according to a new study by the Center for Improving Value in Health Care (CIVHC). Take sore throat, which topped the list of reasons …
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Some national provider organizations have, at times, been downright vehement in opposing the growth of urgent care. The common “complaint” seems to be that allowing patients to receive care without an appointment threatens the well-founded idea of the medical home. On the other hand—as industry insiders and patients know—urgent care provides necessary care at the time it’s needed most. If you want to build up relationships with local providers instead of defensively fending off misperceptions, …
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New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal that one out of every five Americans visits a hospital emergency room at least once a year, with California, Florida, Illinois, New York, and Texas accounting for more than a third of all ED visits nationally. The report also reconfirms that most of these patients are adults who are not admitted to the hospital. Of interest to urgent care operators, the national rate for …
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Add Intermountain Healthcare to the growing list of large healthcare providers that offer patients the chance to connect with a physician from the comfort of their own phone. IHC’s Connect Care will be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week and charge a flat fee of $49. Patients who the provider thinks need to be seen right away will get a referral and not be charged for the virtual visit. IHC operates 31 …
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