Practice Management
A New York City urgent care operator is being sued by a former employee who says he was instructed by upper management to over-dilute COVID-19 vaccine in order to stretch the supply, and subsequently fired when he and other employees complained about the alleged scheme. The company, which runs several vaccination sites in the borough of Queens, denies issuing any such instructions to its vaccinators. What’s alleged, however, is that they were told to use …
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Recently, we told you about an Associated Press article reporting that while “suspicious” child deaths have risen since the COVID-19 pandemic began, reports of suspected child abuse dropped. The presumption was that professionals with a duty to report, such as teachers, coaches, and clergy, simply were not seeing children up close and therefore were not privy to signs of abuse. Now an article published by JAMA Network confirms that reports went down at the outset …
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Urgent care professionals as a group are among the most trusted healthcare workers. How else can you explain the public’s willingness to trust their healthcare to a stranger in ever-growing numbers? It’s especially important, then, to ensure that your team is educating patients and making recommendations for vaccination against the COVID-19 vaccine from a place of experience and credibility. Unfortunately, that can’t be said in some quarters—and the consequences are starting to become evident. Cleveland …
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For too long, urgent care was perceived as the ugly stepchild of various other practice settings—emergency medicine light, doc-in-a-box…pick your dismissive stereotype. Given the evolution of ownership structures since then, from entrepreneurial physicians to venture capitalists and major health systems, it shouldn’t be a surprise that a key metric—physician salaries—have actually started trending higher than some longer-established specialties. According to new data from the American Medical Group Association and published online as a slideshow by …
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The COVID-19 pandemic seemed to have put a deep freeze on urgent care acquisitions, so maybe it’s a good sign of things to come that Bain Capital just announced a deal to acquire New England-based ConvenientMD from Starr Investment Holdings. While the value of the deal was not revealed, ConvenientMD’s 26 locations in Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire took in around $105 million in revenue last year. Early plans under the new ownership call for …
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The COVID-19 pandemic has put a strain on volunteer organizations just as it has businesses, school systems, and healthcare organizations. Not only have usually committed volunteers been forced to stay home instead of donating their time and efforts for the good of others, but in the economic downturn fundraising has been at its lowest point in years, across the board. So, now that we’re in the early stages of a comeback, it’s heartening to see …
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The past few weeks have seen a jump in the number of Americans who are able to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. While it’s still up to individual states to determine who is eligible, from a regulatory approval standpoint that population should soon include anyone 12 years of age and up thanks to an Emergency Use Authorization granted to the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine. All that’s left is for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to give …
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The urgent care industry has been working tirelessly for decades to highlight its ability to provide immediate, high-quality care at a fraction of the cost of a trip to the emergency room. If a story published recently in Health Affairs is any indication, those efforts are paying off in reducing lower-acuity visits to the ED. Looking at insurance claims and enrollment data amassed by a managed care plan between 2008 and 2019, researchers noted that …
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As with testing supplies early on in the pandemic, most urgent care operators have had a hard time getting their hands on enough doses of COVID-19 vaccine to really make a difference in their communities. That could be changing in the near future, however, as multiple states are reporting that the demand for COVID-19 vaccines is waning—leaving them with the unexpected challenge of ensuring that their supply is put to good use while it’s viable. …
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In many parts of the country, it’s been more than a year since the majority of children attended school on site, full time. Now that roughly half the adult population has gotten at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine and children as young as 16 are eligible (with that threshold expected to be lowered in the near future), many districts are inviting more kids back in. Not all parents are as comfortable with this prospect …
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