Marketplace

When someone with cancer experiences unexplained pain, nausea, or any number of symptoms that could be alarming given their condition, their first reaction may be to call their oncologist. The problem is, they’re often not available spontaneously. The next logical option, historically, has been the emergency room. We all know that sitting in a crowded waiting room full of sick people for hours is definitely not what the doctor would have ordered, though. As you’ve …

The key attributes that have allowed urgent care to flourish are its ability to provide clinically excellent care in a way that is less time-consuming and lower cost than the emergency room, and more readily accessible than traditional office-based practices. That’s what we have to offer. The question is, how well does that match up with the rationale patients use when selecting their site of care? Pretty well, it turns out, if a new study …

Today, SouthStar Urgent Care has 11 clinics in relatively small markets in Louisiana. By year’s end, they expect to have 19; come 2020, they’re adding another 18, tripling their location count in the space of a few months. SouthStar’s new president and chief operating officer says the sudden, dramatic growth is a sign of the company’s commitment to Louisiana and its passion for supporting communities. While that may be, urgent care watchers also recognize it …

Publications as diverse as Black Enterprise magazine and The Birmingham Times in Alabama have picked up on a real urgent care success story—one that should resonate with the entire healthcare industry and the country as a whole. In the seat of some of the civil rights movements’ most contentious (and violent) moments, a young, female, African-American urgent care professional has co-founded a pediatric urgent care center. Tiffany Alexander, 27, also serves as the operations manager …

HCA Healthcare continues to expand its footprint by acquiring existing locations from other companies—this time filling its basket with 24 MedSpring urgent care centers previously owned by Fresenius Medical Care. The locations are in markets where HCA already has urgent care facilities, so the latest move should allow HCA to offer services to more patients more conveniently, rather than stretching to cover a broader geographic area. HCA’s network of urgent care centers will now include …

In a bold attempt to wrangle Millennial patients in search of a healthcare setting that meets their needs, a company called Forward is billing itself as the “Next Gen Doctor’s Office.” Its website promises whole-body wellness, a personalized health plan, and unlimited office visits (and “app support”). Essentially, it’s a direct, membership-based primary care model that offers 24/7 on-demand access via telemedicine. The obvious question for JUCM News readers is, what does this mean for …

The internet age has made it possible for urgent care operators to reach patients who would have otherwise never heard of them. When someone wakes up sick and needs to see a provider, they’re likely to head right to Google and type in “urgent care” and their location. This may be especially true of travelers just passing through your area now that vacation season is here. Savvy operators have developed methods (such as search engine …

In announcing their plans to merge, CityMD and Summit Medical Group say they envision creating a single organization that would offer patients a “seamless experience across a full spectrum of high-quality primary, specialty, and urgent care.” It would be premature to assume they’ll succeed or fail in that attempt, but what is undeniable is that the resulting organization will be a very large one. CityMD has become nearly ubiquitous in the New York City metropolitan …

Urgent care has been heralded for its patient-friendly (many would even say consumer-friendly) approach to providing quality care. Patients respond well to it because it’s such a contrast to what they’ve become accustomed to: long waits, brusk treatment, and generally feeling like they’re being rushed through a very important and personal experience. Having seen how well the new approach works, however, more traditional healthcare facilities are now jumping on the consumerism bandwagon. Some health systems …

Every patient covets convenience and speed when they make choices about where to seek immediate care. Urgent care and retail clinics both offer those attributes. Just as much (if not more), though, patients want to know they’re going to get the quality of care they need—and that’s where they see a difference between retail and urgent care, according to a new study from WD Partners. The research actually compared those two segments along with primary …