Practice Management
The United States Department of Health and Human Services is working on a pilot program that would give ambulance operators the option—aided by incentives—to take patients with nonemergent complaints to lower-cost setting like urgent care instead of the emergency room. While the aim is to reduce Medicare and Medicaid costs, patients would benefit from getting in and out of a healthcare facility in less time, with less exposure to whatever brought other patients to the …
Read More
There’s a strange dichotomy afoot in California emergency rooms: Patients are heading to the emergency room in greater numbers than in years past—but even more of them are leaving against medical advice out of frustration over waiting so long to see a provider, according to data from the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development and published recently in California Healthline. Approximately 352,000 ED visits in 2017 ended with patients leaving after seeing a doctor …
Read More
The 2018–2019 flu season is over—according to the calendar, though new cases continue to be reported. As such, it’s a good time to assess the effectiveness of campaigns to drive immunization rates among healthcare workers. According to data from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), issuing a requirement for healthcare workers to get a flu shot both increases the proportion of staff who do so and lowers the rate of individuals who get the flu. …
Read More
We’ve all heard how the infamous, impending physician shortage will make efficient delivery of quality care more challenging than ever before. As we’ve told you, those concerns are actually influencing the evolution of urgent care—for example, leading operators to consider greater utilization of advanced-practice providers. Interestingly, a new post on Advisory Board turns the whole issue on its ear by asking the question, “does America have a physician shortage—or are our doctors ‘just bad at …
Read More
By and large, urgent care operators are very diligent when it comes to following the guidelines laid down in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996—much better knowns as HIPAA. However, even without malice aforethought, you may inadvertently stray into noncompliance, leaving your business open to serious penalties. Such was pointed out in a FierceHealth article that discussed ways it’s easy for medical providers in general to slip out of compliance; in fact, …
Read More
The Department of Health and Human Services seems to be following President Trump’s call to make healthcare pricing more transparent, according to an article recently published in the Wall Street Journal—a move which, if it comes to fruition, would likely boost urgent care’s reputation as a lower cost alternative than the emergency room. Most recently, the DOH issued a call for public comment on whether patients should know the “true” cost of care before they …
Read More
With the recently proposed prior authorization bill in the news, the magazine Managed Care chose an opportune time to give its readers fresh insights into urgent care. An article in the current issue looks at a few representative New England urgent care markets to illustrate why the marketplace continues to grow, and its relative merits compared with other settings (notably, the emergency room). Urgent Care Association CEO Laurel Stoimenoff, PT, CHC is quoted extensively, as …
Read More
When we last updated you on the measles outbreak in the United States, there were 465 cases spread across 19 states. At the time, that was the highest number of U.S. cases since 2000, when measles was declared “eliminated.” Well, the number of cases now sits at 839—a jump of 374 cases—in 23 states, all diagnosed between January 1 and May 10 of this year. One challenge: The potential to contract measles isn’t limited to …
Read More
As we told you last month, the private equity firm Warburg Pincus had big plans to merge DocuTAP and Practice Velocity, the two leading technology and services companies serving the urgent care marketplace. That goal has now been realized in the form of Experity, whose mission will be to continue to support and invest in all the current software platforms and services previously provided by the merging companies while offering customers—some 4,000 clinics across the …
Read More
Social media platforms can be more than a treasure trove of baby pictures, cat videos, and inflammatory political rhetoric. Some urgent care physicians have become adept at utilizing their features for the good of their patients, their practices, and even their careers. Tyeese L. Gaines, DO, MBA is one. The founder of NOWMed Urgent Care in Jersey City, NJ was quoted extensively in a recent post on the AMA’s website, detailing how Facebook, Twitter, and …
Read More