Practice Management
Urgent care as an industry is in a precarious position as the COVID-19 pandemic surge rages on. Driven by the most transmissible variant to date, multiple states and major cities are grappling with their largest caseloads yet. Overcrowding in emergency rooms is so bad that hospital administrators and public health officials from Philadelphia to Iowa are recommending that patients stay away from the ED if at all possible and opt to visit their closest urgent …
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HCA Healthcare is making significant investments in the Florida healthcare market, with their latest move being to purchase MD Now Urgent Care. Adding those 59 locations comes on the heels of an announcement in November that the company plans to build three new hospitals in Florida, where it already serves 6.4 million patients through 400 affiliated cites across the state. The company says it’s the largest urgent care provider in Florida. Though just made public, …
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Urgent message: Concern over the potential spread of COVID-19 may (or may not) have affected the timeliness with which parents chose to present with children who had symptoms concerning for acute otitis media, thereby throwing the concept of “delayed” antibiotic prescribing into question. Emily J. Montgomery, MD; Brian R. Lee, PhD, MPH; Amanda Montalbano, MD, MPH; Amanda Nedved, MD Citation: Montgomery RJ, Lee BR, Montalbano A, Nedved A. Time to presentation for acute otitis media …
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With the last days of 2021 winding down, some parts of the country are as deeply embedded in the COVID-19 pandemic as they’ve ever been. In New York City, urgent care centers are seeing up to five times their normal volume while at the same time grappling with staffing shortages (which are at least partially due to the virus to begin with). Patients need care for all the “normal” urgent care complaints while locations are …
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We’re all aware that it can be difficult for some regions of the United States to attract enough top-tier providers to meet the needs of smaller communities. JUCM has been covering this issue for years, in fact (see Rural and Tertiary Markets: The Next Urgent Care Frontier). And that’s during “normal” times. Lack of access, sometimes poor healthcare literacy, and the politicization of COVID-19 has put an inordinate amount of additional stress on rural health …
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The Occupational Health and Safety Administration’s plan to require employers with 100 or more workers to institute a COVID-19 vaccine mandate will go forward after all, thanks to a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth District to reverse a lower-court ruling that blocked the Emergency Temporary Standard. The deadline for implementation is January 10, 2022, leaving urgent care operators who offer occupational medicine services precious little time to help their clients …
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A consistent rationalization for vaccine-hesitant Americans is an irrational fear that the approved COVID-19 vaccines are not safe. That belief is unfounded, of course, given the wealth of evidence that risk for side effects is minimal while the protection offered by the vaccines is great but that doesn’t stop people from espousing it online and discouraging the undecided crowd from getting the shots. Now the legal profession may be adding to the manufactured controversy. “Vaccine …
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Nearly 2 years after COVID-19 became a significant threat in the United States, we suddenly have not one but two oral drugs available to treat infected patients. Just last week the Food and Drug Administration granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to oral antiviral medications from Pfizer and Merck, both of which have been shown to reduce risk for patients with mild to moderate disease who are at risk for severe illness. That doesn’t necessarily mean …
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With caseloads climbing to levels that exceed previous “worst days” of the COVID-19 pandemic, the potential for significant damage to an already fraught supply chain and worker shortage across multiple industries is high. That includes urgent care centers, of course, as patients seeking refuge from the emergency room or a last-minute COVID test flock to understaffed locations across the country. A new recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers hope, however. Instead …
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With emergency rooms packed with patients who could have COVID-19, patients experiencing minor symptoms of stroke may be more likely than ever to visit an urgent care center instead of the ED. As such, it would behoove you to be aware of newly published research comparing ticagrelor plus aspirin or clopidogrel plus aspirin vs aspirin alone in patients with minor ischemic stroke and transient ischemic attack. The article, published online by JAMA Network, drew data …
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