Practice Management
Back-to-school time typically means parents are scrambling to make sure their children’s immunization status is current. This year, of course, how (or even if) schools should reopen is a hotly debated issue in many communities. Regardless of how that controversy works out in your neck of the woods, you have to be prepared to administer needed vaccines—and to answer questions. Anticipating this, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has produced a Vaccination Guidance During …
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Patients are understandably (albeit overanxiously) concerned about every little cough these days. You want to be reassuring, but also keep an open mind about the prospects of them having COVID-19. New research from the University of Southern California’s Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience sheds light on which symptoms are most likely to occur first in COVID-19 patients, in order: Fever Cough Muscle pain Nausea and/or vomiting Diarrhea Bear this in mind when counseling patients about …
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Many urgent care operators who couldn’t see the value in offering telemedicine services when patients could visit them on site at-will have changed their thinking since the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. Too many patients decided they could wait, or forego care completely, rather than take what they saw as a risk in visiting a healthcare facility. As it turned out, telemedicine gave those operators a chance to stay connected with patients and provide care where …
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There’s a new tactic being employed by people who don’t want to comply with rules on wearing a mask when entering any number of businesses, including urgent care centers. At least one “enterprising” company is even trying to make a buck off the issue, in fact, by producing a bogus “Medical Mask Exemption” card. It states that the bearer “is exempt from face mask usage requirements” and that “wearing a face mask poses a mental …
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Urgent care may have been relegated to the sidelines at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it has entered the game and is contributing in a big way if new data from Experity are any indication. The health information technology company revealed record high visits in July, including 105,000 patients on July 6 alone—the highest single-day volume of the year. The company’s interpretation of the data is that urgent care centers are playing a …
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The urgent care community continues to find innovative ways to ensure it’s not left out of the discussion—and on the sidelines when lives are at stake—during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The latest development is an Urgent Care Association initiative, in partnership with Braid Health, to offer covid-test-finder.com, an online database highlighting urgent care clinics that offer COVID-19 diagnostic or antibody testing in local communities. In the press release announcing availability of the database, UCA CEO …
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Parents and caregivers took some small degree of comfort as COVID-19 surged in “knowing” that the virus didn’t pose much of a risk to children—or so the thinking went at the time. Since then, we’ve become acquainted with multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), a related illness that does seem to pose a greater risk in younger patients. A new article published in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report reveals characteristics of MIS-C that could be …
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Some people scoff at the idea of wearing a mask because they “feel fine” and “would know” if they were sick and likely to pass COVID-19 along to others they come in contact with. If you talk to patients with that belief, share the conclusions of an article just published in JAMA Internal Medicine, which reveals that symptomatic and asymptomatic COVID-19 patients may be walking around with similar cycle thresholds. As the authors point out, …
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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 …
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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 …
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