Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

NERUCA Calls on Stakeholders to Fight New Jersey Bill that Would Curb Urgent Care Growth

Fresh off a successful effort to stop a Massachusetts bill that would have imposed a tax on all urgent care charges, the North East Regional Urgent Care Association (NERUCA) is calling on urgent care providers, operators, and industry advocates to make their voices heard to fight a similarly onerous proposed bill in New Jersey. If passed by state legislators, Assembly Bill A4443 would, NERUCA warns, require annual licensure of urgent care centers; exclude urgent care …

Update: Massachusetts Urgent Care Tax Bill Dies on the Vine

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been following the progress of a tax bill that would have imposed an 8.75% tax on urgent care charges in Massachusetts. Thanks at least in part to strong lobbying against the bill by the Urgent Care Association and the North East Regional Urgent Care Association (NERUCA), among other concerned parties, the bill was stalled as the legislature’s 2018 General Session came to a close. If the bill had gone …

Data Paint an Ugly Picture of the Consequences of Provider Burnout

Physician burnout is at least as dangerous as unsafe workplace conditions when it comes to medical errors, according to a new study published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings. In fact, it indicates that physicians with burnout are more than twice as likely to self-report a medical error compared with those without burnout. The potential consequences of that are dramatic; existing data show that med errors are a factor in as many as 200,000 deaths annually in …

Suddenly, Massachusetts is a Battleground State for Urgent Care Legislative Issues

The Urgent Care Association (UCA) and the North East Regional Urgent Care Association (NERUCA) have stepped up their joint efforts to lobby against proposed legislation in Massachusetts that it says would wreak havoc not only on urgent care operators, but the entire state healthcare system. No longer content to simply urge interested parties to contact their legislators to make their feelings about the legislation known, both groups have gone a step further by staging a …

More States—and Congress—Take Action on Opioid Prescriptions

Florida, Michigan, and Tennessee are the latest states to enact legislation aimed at limiting the amount of opioid medications physicians can prescribed at any one time for acute pain. In Michigan, prescribers cannot write more than a 7-day supply; Florida draws the line at 3 days and makes physicians and pharmacists consult the state prescription drug monitoring database to review a patient’s prescription history. Tennessee let’s pharmacists fill only half the amount of opioids a …

New Jersey on the Verge of Capping Some Nonemergent Medicaid ED Visits at $140

Medicaid patients who go to the ED with what is later deemed to be a “minor or nonemergency case.” While the bill’s sponsor, Assemblyman Louis Greenwald, says it is designed to save the state and taxpayers money, provider organizations and hospitals are obviously not happy. Some 1.8 million residents get coverage through Medicaid, according to state reports, with patients in the fee-for-service managed-care program accounting for about 5% of that number. If the law takes …

Would Massachusetts Bill ‘Enhance Access’ to Care—or Limit Urgent Care Visits?

Legislation under consideration by Massachusetts lawmakers purports to help patients gain access to quality care more easily—the actual title of the bill is the Act to Enhance Access to High Quality, Affordable and Transparent Healthcare, after all. Critics are concerned that it will actually have the opposite effect when it comes to urgent care, however, citing several components of the bill as currently written: An 8.75% tax on the total dollar amount of an urgent …

New Jersey Moves to Make Out-of-Network Charges More Transparent

Legislators in New Jersey have passed legislation aimed at increasing the transparency of health care prices, especially fees for services rendered by out-of-network providers. When it takes effect less than 90 days from now, healthcare facilities and providers will be required to give patients information on network status prior to delivering nonemergent or nonurgent care. That last stipulation is what should be of interest to urgent care operators: The law says care provided on an …

Florida Joins States that Limit Opioid Prescriptions

Florida Gov. Rick Scott just signed new legislation into effect limiting the amount of opioid pain relievers physicians can write at one time. As other states have done, and as has been discussed at the federal level, the bill will limit opioid prescriptions for acute pain to a 3-day supply, though Florida prescribers will have the option of writing for a 7-day supply if medically necessary. The law will require prescribers to check the state’s …

Trump Administration Promotes Patient Ownership of Health Data

The White House and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services are promoting a move toward greater patient ownership of their own medical records—which would also bolster interoperability among providers, they say. If the MyHealthEData initiative is successful, its proponents say it could help save some of the 400,000 lives lost annually because providers don’t have timely access to a patient’s complete medical history. CMS Director Seema Verma framed the plan in the context of …