Practice Management
You’ve probably seen videos of confrontations involving individuals who refuse to wear a face cover where one is required by local regulations or the proprietor to help stop the spread of COVID-19. Urgent care centers are not immune to this phenomenon. The question is, what would your staff do if a patient or family member came in without a mask and refused to comply with requests to put one on? An article just published in …
Read More
Loss of smell was identified early on as one telltale sign of COVID-19 infection. However, a study just published in the Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology indicates that anosmia may actually be an independent prognostic sign of less severe illness. The study of 949 COVID-19–positive people found loss of smell to be significantly associated with decreased need for hospitalization, admission to the intensive care unit, intubation, and acute respiratory distress syndrome. The researchers found …
Read More
As parents and school districts wrestle with the safest way to begin the school year in light of COVID-19, public health officials are bracing themselves for the day flu season starts to overlap with the pandemic. So, news that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects new cases of acute flaccid myelitis to start mounting soon is concerning, to say the least. The CDC issued a warning that “2020 will be another peak year …
Read More
A crowded waiting room can stress out both front-desk staff and clinicians. And barring obviously emergent presentations, human error can occur when deciding which patient needs attention first. An article just published in Fortune magazine introduces a new machine learning-powered triage system that was created to streamline and assure appropriate triage—with a focus on urgent care. The new system, developed by a company called Epic, analyzes a patient’s electronic medical records and their current vital …
Read More
When you spend time with a patient and counsel them to self-isolate due to concerns over COVID-19, you’re using the expertise you’ve developed through years of training and treating others. Up until now, however, there’s been no mechanism to reimburse you for that that time, which you could be spending to provide revenue-generating care. Recognizing this, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have announced that payment …
Read More
A not-yet-finalized study of COVID-19 contact tracing in South Korea indicates that children under the age of 9 have the lowest virus transmissibility rate among all age groups. While that’s good news in considering the risk to the youngest children and their close contacts, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, points out that the converse conclusion—that children 10 and up are fully capable of transmitting the disease—could spell …
Read More
Recognizing its own potential to lead urgent care’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic on a national scale, the Urgent Care Association is working with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) on its Technical Resources, Assistance Center, and Information Exchange (TRACIE) program. UCA leaders met with ASPR TRACIE just a few weeks ago, in advance of a report for the emergency preparedness community about urgent care’s experiences, …
Read More
It’s taken a while for data to catch up with the potential harm that could await children who contract COVID-19, but it’s becoming clearer that children who become severely ill with the virus may have certain things in common with kids who have better-understood conditions. Urgent care providers should be wary of assuming that similarities in presenting characteristics equate to similar trajectories ahead, however. A new study just published by the Journal of the American …
Read More
As we’ve discussed in previous issues of JUCM News, urgent care was largely left out of the mix when public health officials were strategizing how to cope with the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many centers scrambled to get testing supplies and then to establish themselves as testing centers; other, multilocation operators established some locations as “COVID-free” zones while instructing symptomatic patients to visit one particular clinic. Next Level Urgent Care is going another …
Read More
One of the vexing issues employers are facing is how to welcome workers back to their jobs without subjecting them to undue risk of exposure to COVID-19. Testing each person before they’re permitted to enter the building might sound like the safest option, but doing so would be so time-consuming as to be completely impractical. Pool sampling—in which a batch of samples is run through a single diagnostic test—could be one way to test large …
Read More