Practice Management
Whether your operation is having staffing issues or not, certainly you’re aware that many urgent care centers (as well as practices in other settings) are short on workers. Given that the United States is also suffering another surge in COVID-19 cases, this time driven by the highly contagious Omicron variant, that staffing “issue” is on the verge of becoming a crisis. Most recently, CityMD announced it has temporarily closed 19 locations in the metropolitan New …
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At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the presumed telltale signs of infection were obvious: fever, respiratory distress, chills. Then more subtle symptoms like diminished senses of loss and smell became more apparent. Eventually, we understood that some people developed few (or even no) symptoms—but that they could still infect others and be “sick” for months themselves. Unfortunately, the learning curve continues as an article just published by JAMA Network reveals that the proportion of …
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Urgent message: It is common for transgender patients to have a history of poor experiences with healthcare providers. As such, they may be less likely to have an ongoing clinical relationship with a primary care provider, making urgent care a likely destination when a need arises. Familiarity with issues facing adolescent transgender patients, in particular, can benefit both the provider and the patient. Timothy McGinnis and Emily Montgomery, MD THE CASE A 15-year-old transgender male …
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You know that complete vaccination, including a full two-dose regimen plus a booster shot, offers excellent protection against COVID-19 infection. You’re also aware that recovering from the virus leaves patients with protection from natural antibodies. Now there’s research suggesting that vaccinated patients who experience and recover from breakthrough cases may have the best protection man and nature can provide. The authors of a Research Letter published by the Journal of the American Medical Association wrote …
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With the Omicron variant now the most common form of COVID-19 in the United States—and with the best way to reduce risk being fully vaccinated and boosted against the virus, as JUCM News has reported—urgent care centers can expect to see more patients seeking that third shot (if they’re not turning up already). That’s only one reason you’re likely to see volumes rise, however, as the Omicron virus has many symptomatic and nonsymptomatic people panicking …
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Just 3 weeks after the first Omicron-related diagnosis of COVID-19 in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that this latest variant of the virus has become the dominant one in this country, accounting for 73% of new cases here as of this writing. Bear in mind that’s the national figure; Omicron is even more dominant in New York, New Jersey, and parts of the Midwest, South, and Pacific Northwest. The …
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With increasing spread of the Omicron COVID-19 variant, some states have already upgraded their pandemic status (New Jersey, for example, just went from yellow [moderate] to orange [high]). That doesn’t bode well for the future, given predictions from the PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia that the entire country will see a dramatic jump in new cases over the next 4 weeks. A ripple effect that began with travel and gatherings over Thanksgiving weekend is …
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While attempts to offer behavioral health services in an urgent care setting (or even using an urgent care approach) have failed to gain traction, that doesn’t mean the idea lacks merit. And with emergency rooms struggling with the dual burden of COVID-19 and staffing shortages, whatever community resources are available to decrease the need for people in a mental health crisis to head to the ED could be impactful. That’s exactly what’s happening in the …
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Multiple tools to detect pulmonary embolism are at the urgent care provider’s disposal. And yet, misses happen. The Journal of the American Medical Association just published an article on research that tested an alternate method to detect PE, combining the YEARS rule with age-adjusted D-dimer threshold—and the authors concluded that this method “did not lead to an inferior rate of thromboembolic events compared with a conventional diagnostic strategy.” The cluster-randomized crossover noninferiority study focused on …
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With the blessing of the Centers for Disease Control of Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, urgent care providers are now at liberty to administer booster doses of COVID-19 vaccine for patients as young as 16 years of age. The CDC made its recommendation the same day the FDA announced that it had expanded its Emergency Use Authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to include 16- and 17-year-olds. As with adults, those boosters can be …
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