Practice Management
Urgent care insiders and advocates have known it intuitively for a long time, but now data are bearing out the fact that urgent care centers really do help thin out the congestion (and associated cost) in emergency rooms—especially in areas where there are multiple locations to choose from. A multistate study by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows there’s a 1.4% increase in ED visits by privately insured patients when urgent care centers are …
Read MoreUrgent care operators that offer occupational medicine in New York may want to consider what it would take to start offering telemedicine services if they’re not doing so already. The Empire State is taking a harder look at whether telemedicine could be a viable option to broaden access to clinicians for injured workers who otherwise might not get the care they need. One possible motive for the newfound interest: Industry observers have noted that New …
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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has completed mailing new cards to the 61 million people covered by Medicare in the U.S., each with their own unique, randomly assigned Medicare Beneficiary Identifier (MBI). The old cards were based on each person’s Social Security number, the widespread access to which left individuals open to identity theft. When the plan was rolled out to the public last April, CMS said it would take a year for …
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Public health officials in numerous states, most notably California, Massachusetts, and New Jersey are reporting significant flu activity—some exceeding even last year’s severe flu season. California has seen a relatively high number of deaths (42) for this point in the season. Roughly half of those have Top of Formoccurred in the elderly. Flu has been called “widespread” in New Jersey, to the extent that some hospitals there are imposing restrictions on people visiting hospitals. AtlantiCare …
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Feeling the pressure to improve outcomes while simultaneously cutting costs, an ever-growing number of hospitals and health systems are investing heavily in urgent care. Of particular note are four health systems that splurged in the fourth quarter of 2018. Becker’s Hospital Review highlighted the following in a recent post: San Francisco-based Dignity Health partnered with GoHealth Urgent Care to buy six urgent care centers operated by Golden State Urgent care. McLaren Health Care, in Grand …
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Researchers at Emory University School of Medicine are enlisting clinicians, patients, caregivers, and schools to help evaluate Emory’s own TBI Evaluation and Management (TEaM) Toolkit, with the intention of rolling it out to health systems ultimately. The toolkit was devised to boost recovery in children with mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). The aim of the Emory study will be to show that validated “clinical practice and education for patients, caregivers, clinical providers and schools is …
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An article just published online by NBC News takes potshots at the cost of healthcare marketing, implying (and outright stating, through “experts” quoted in the piece) that it raises healthcare spending unnecessarily and causes some consumers to fret over diseases they didn’t even know existed. It cites data, published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association, revealing that overall healthcare marketing spending is up to $30 billion a year (nearly twice what it …
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The federal government shutdown could cause both minor inconveniences and major problems for urgent care operations, depending on how long it drags on. It’s unclear how well the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will be running if workers are off the job for a while, for example. And urgent care operators who provide occupational medicine services to government customers could see diminished business. Some urgent care centers might also end up benefiting from the …
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Urgent care providers wrestle with decisions about antibiotic prescribing every day. It’s not made any easier by patients who plead for a script, either. Some guidance, or at least validation, might be drawn from a new Viewpoint piece published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, however. It analyzes concepts put forth by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, identifying four “moments” in which clinicians should ask themselves certain questions about each patient’s …
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The acquisition of ZoomCare by PeaceHealth brings what was predicted to be a retail-style phenomenon under the umbrella of a relatively traditional hospital system. The irony is that ZoomCare was in need of cash despite offering a practice model designed to appeal to millennial patients (the largest segment of the U.S. population today), but is still an appealing property to a regional hospital powerhouse. One of the key values is presumed to be access and …
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