Practice Management
There’s been much discussion, including public service announcements from the Surgeon General of the United States, of the need to maintain visits for ongoing and acute healthcare concerns in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic. As urgent care operators know, however, patients have stayed away in droves (especially in the early days of the crisis). What may come as news is the fact that patients 65 years of age and over have been most hesitant, especially …
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Suggestions that urgent care was any more responsible for overuse of antibiotics—and subsequent drug resistance—than other practice settings were largely blown out of proportion. For one thing, patients self-select urgent care over other settings when it seems evident that an antibiotic is needed, so it’s likely that urgent care providers see more patients who really do need a prescription. Clearly there are instances where one is given even though it’s not indicated, as well. As …
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When tests for COVID-19 first became available, there was no place at the table for urgent care. Supplies were allocated elsewhere, while simultaneously patients were afraid of visiting urgent care center locations, lest they raise their risk of getting sick (a largely unfounded fear). The drop in patient visits and revenue has been well documented. Now as talk of the arrival of one or more vaccines against the virus heats up, there’s concern in some …
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Having been lulled into a fall sense of safety when it came to children and COVID-19, it came as a shock to the general public when word started to spread about multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C). It’s probably less shocking, but perhaps just as frightening, then, to learn that MIS appears to strike adults with the virus. The concern about this revelation—besides caring for the individual patient who’s affected—is that this has occurred under …
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As happens often with advances in the way medicine is practiced—and billed for—telemedicine has now reached a level of acceptance sufficient for widespread fraud to become an issue. The U.S. Department of Justice has levied charges of fraud totaling more than $6 billion against 345 people in 51 federal districts, with $4.5 billion of that sum connected to telemedicine billing. It’s the DOJ’s biggest fraud roundup ever. Those charged in the telemedicine sweep 86 defendants, …
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Zoom+Care has carved out an identity for itself as a tech-savvy provider of urgent care services on a regional level in the Pacific Northwest. According to a report posted on Geekwire.com, however, the company says it’s going to devote more energy into offering virtual medicine services—to the extent that they think they reach nearly 8 million more patients in Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. There are also plans to open additional brick-and-mortar facilities in both …
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Opinions on exactly when it will happen vary considerably, but all informed parties agree that at least one safe, effective vaccine against COVID-19 will be available in the coming months. The question is…what then? The College of Urgent Care Medicine is working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to make sure urgent care operators have a chance to be up to date on plans to facilitate widespread vaccination, as will be detailed in …
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Since the COVID-19 pandemic really took hold in the U.S., there’s been a presumption that patients who were infected with and then recovered from the virus had protection against reinfection. We now know that’s not correct, however; patients can get COVID-19 more than once. So far, evidence indicates reinfection is rare—but there have been confirmed cases, the first one in the U.S. being a symptomatic 25-year-old, otherwise healthy, man who first tested positive on April …
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U.S. media reports in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic drove many worried citizens to seek care (or even just testing) wherever they could, without regard to whether it was the best setting for their situation. Months later, as billing is catching up, it’s time to pay the piper—and some of the bills are far higher than patients may have expected. As we’ve seen historically, a good number are associated with freestanding emergency rooms. …
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Since March, there have been many conflicting reports, as well as actual studies, on how COVID-19 is transmitted, who is at greatest risk, and how the virus is transmitted. The length of time a patient is considered infectious has been the subject of ever-changing intel, as well. At one point, 6 days was thought to be the window; then it was 10, and then 14 days. Now the Journal of Infection has published a paper …
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