Practice Management
An Alabama urgent care center learned the hardest possible way that it’s a mistake to assume a young, healthy-appearing patient wouldn’t have a life-threatening condition in spite of worsening symptoms. The patient in question was a 20-year-old college student who first presented with shortness of breath, chest pain, headache, and sore throat. The diagnosis reached that day was bronchitis, for which she received a prescription for an antibiotic and advice to return if her symptoms …
Read More
Walgreens is shutting down nearly half of its in-store clinics due to stronger-than-anticipated competition, such as from the still-growing urgent care sector, and will instead start focusing more on telehealth services. The 200 retail locations that will remain open will mostly be those run through healthcare partnerships and focus more on complex and chronic health conditions like asthma, as opposed to immediate care. According to a recent post from mHealth Intelligence, Walgreens’ decision is part …
Read More
Visits to Zoom+Care locations are growing at a double-digit pace in both the Seattle and Portland markets, prompting the company to hire over a hundred new workers in order to meet the increased demand. How do we know this? The good news was called out in the Portland Business Journal recently, after which that article was blasted out via social media by Zoom+Care itself—for thousands of prospective patients and business leaders to see. The growth …
Read More
The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission’s unanimous recommendation that Congress do away with “incident-to” billing could have a strong effect on physician assistants and nurse practitioners—and therefore, considering the growing role PAs and NPs play in this setting, on urgent care overall. If incident-to billing is eliminated, PAs and NPs will have to bill independently and at a lower reimbursement rate than they do now. Currently, the services of PAs and NPs who are truly assisting …
Read More
A new GoHealth Urgent Care-supported study by The Health Management Academy indicates that 74% of leading health systems are likely to expand their urgent care presence over the next 5 years, though only 11% say they’re “thriving” in urgent care at this point. (For purposes of the survey, “leading health systems” include the top 25 U.S. health systems based on net patient revenue per health system.) According to Thriving in the Urgent Care Market: The …
Read More
Much has been written and said about the preferences of patients in the Millennial generation (defined by Pew Research as anyone born between 1981 and 1996). And rightly so; they’re a sizable portion of your prospective patient population. What may be overlooked, however, is the fact that this same age segment also makes up a sizable portion of your prospective workforce, including physicians. In fact, according to a blog post on the UCA website, authored …
Read More
It’s estimated that 23,000 people in the United States die from drug-resistant infections annually. Overuse and inappropriate use of antibiotics is one of the key culprits in that phenomenon. And yet, antibiotics are an indispensable weapon against disease; ceasing to prescribe them is not an option. The only answer is for all healthcare providers to prescribe responsibly. To learn more about what that really means in the urgent care center, carve out some time to …
Read More
On the heels of a World Health Organization decision to classify burnout as a legitimate workplace phenomenon, the National Academy of Medicine just released a report focused on preventing, identifying, and helping to manage clinician burnout. It also estimates that between one third and one half of all clinicians in the United States are affected by burnout. Objectives laid out in the report include establishing positive work environments; addressing burnout in training and at the …
Read More
Physician assistants and nurse practitioners, known collectively as advanced practice providers (APPs), are doing a great job administering care to patients in urgent care centers and other settings all over the country. With the worsening physician shortage, their contributions are going to become more and more essential as time goes on. So, it’s more important than ever to ensure that all the clinicians in your urgent care operation are working in concert with each other. …
Read More
Texas has taken some hard knocks for the proliferation of freestanding emergency rooms there—especially in light of criticism of that industry for surprise billing. It seems too many patients walk into a freestanding ED thinking it’s an urgent care center, only to be socked with emergency room-like charges weeks or months later. The upside (for urgent care, anyway) is that the controversies prompted the Texas Association of Health Plans to do a study of cost …
Read More