Practice Management
Some among the public may view the term social distancing as being sentenced to boredom for an indefinite period, regardless of the intended result of mitigating the spread of COVID-19. Others might welcome it as an opportunity for solitude or spending time with their nuclear family. For a few of your patients and prospective patients, though, the thought of being more or less housebound with minimal contact with the outside world could bring about acute …
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Recommendations to carefully consider which patients truly need opioid pain medications are having their intended effect in emergency rooms across the U.S. According to new data just released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a downward trend in patients receiving a prescription for opioids when they check out of the ED is ongoing. (In the period of 2010–2011, 21.5% of patients left the ED with a prescription for opioids; in the 2016–2017 study …
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With the COVID-19 situation changing by the minute—literally, at times—urgent care providers may feel swamped with competing demands for testing, treatment, and reassuring patients who really don’t have any related worries. Add to that the fact that there’s been little definitive direction from federal health agencies on how to treat patients who do have COVID-19. Now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a directive that could be helpful—both for patient care and …
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With public fears over COVID-19 at a high pitch, emergency rooms and urgent care centers are being taxed to keep up with demand for immediate attention and care. They’re also learning on the fly how to mitigate risk for infecting other patients, and the staff themselves. Most patients have nothing to worry about, but those who might actually be infected run the risk of infecting others if the right procedures aren’t followed once those patients …
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Patients experiencing atrial fibrillation for the first time sometimes mistake their symptoms for a heart attack and call 911 or rush off to the emergency room. Once they’ve gone through it a few times, and understand that AFib is not high-risk in the short term, they tend to take a more relaxed approach. Some simply call their cardiologist or electrophysiologist so they can track the event. Others may be inclined to visit an urgent care …
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The state legislature in Virginia just passed a bill that enables ambulances to transport patients directly to 24-hour urgent care centers and other nonhospital healthcare facilities when clinically appropriate. While clearly that indicates recognition that urgent care centers offer care on par with the ED, short of life- or limb-threatening emergencies, the interesting thing is that only one urgent care operator, Kaiser Permanents, runs facilities that are open 24 hours a day in the Commonwealth. …
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Regular readers of JUCM and JUCM News know pediatric urgent care is a growing segment of our industry. However, as has been the case with urgent care in general historically, data on practice norms are scarce. Penn State University is working to help remedy that by conducting a survey about urgent care centers’ capability to treat children. Questions seek information on availability of nearby emergency room and children’s hospital care, the level of training in …
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COVID-19 is capturing the public’s attention more than any other health crisis right now. The concern, warranted or not, is that a worldwide pandemic will prove more deadly than any other outbreak in recent history. A more immediate, albeit secondary concern, as noted in an article just published online by Forbes, is that a variety of factors could conspire to create dangerous drug shortages. According to the Food and Drug Administration, one medication is already …
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We told you recently about pending legislation in Virginia that would enable pharmacists to prescribe—not just dispense—medications for certain conditions, such as strep throat and influenza. Now comes news that Florida is working on legislation, Senate Bill 714, that would empower pharmacists to essentially conduct a primary care provider-style patient visit for flu. If it becomes law, a patient with flu-like symptoms could go to a drugstore, be given an instant lab test in the …
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Over the past few days, the Centers or Disease Control and Prevention and various state health departments have released details about a growing number of confirmed and presumptive cases of COVID-19. The general public has been attentive to local and national media coverage on the subject, with many taking to social media to express concern and to conjecture about how serious the threat may be in their areas. Unfortunately, much of that “conjecture” feeds an …
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