Practice Management
The Urgent Care Association (UCA) and the North East Regional Urgent Care Association (NERUCA) have stepped up their joint efforts to lobby against proposed legislation in Massachusetts that it says would wreak havoc not only on urgent care operators, but the entire state healthcare system. No longer content to simply urge interested parties to contact their legislators to make their feelings about the legislation known, both groups have gone a step further by staging a …
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Anthem’s policy of refusing to pay on nonemergent visits to the emergency room (after the fact, at their discretion) has moved the Medical Association of Georgia and the American College of Emergency Physicians to file a lawsuit in U.S. district court. The two groups hope to get the court to compel Anthem and subsidiary Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia to abandon the policy, which is intended to discourage patients from going to the emergency …
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It’s unclear whether human error or ill intent on the part of hackers is to blame, but on July 10 the records of more than 200,000 patients who had visited Premier Immediate Medical Care was exposed was “left exposed” for over a month on a practice management software server. The software provider, MedEvolve, says it is notifying current and former Premier patients that their names, billing addresses, telephone numbers, insurance status, and, for some, Social …
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Robert Redfield, MD took the reins at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the midst of a national explosion in opioid addiction and death. As such, he vowed that tackling the problem would be a top priority for the CDC. Right now, that means demanding that his agency set new guidelines for prescribing opioids for short-term pain and implementing new systems to track overdoses in hospital emergency rooms. However, a study conducted and …
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Prosecutions for relatively small-time violations of patient privacy under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) are becoming more common, in spite of the fact that larger-scale data breaches and fraud investigations grab all the headlines. One reason: Such violations may be low-hanging fruit that helps federal prosecutors win convictions more easily than more sweeping investigations. The HIPAA “privacy rule” sets standards to protect individuals’ medical records and other personal health information, requiring that …
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It’s not all that unusual for patients to be diagnosed with diabetes in an urgent care center they’ve visited for unrelated complaints. The question is, how common or uncommon is it, and will knowing the answer to that question help urgent care providers be better prepared for such occurrences? We may have a better idea once the Urgent Care Foundation (UCF) finishes its study to measure the benefits of diabetes screening in urgent care. With …
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The lure of padding his income by taking off-the-books cash from patients seeking illicit opiate medications was apparently too much for one urgent care physician; he just pled guilty in New Haven, CT federal court to charges of narcotics distribution. He also copped to healthcare fraud based on his practice of prescribing unnecessary opiates to patients who didn’t want or need them, some of whom never even ingested the medications. Many of them were enrolled …
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A new article published online by Forbes suggests that Walgreens, which is working with MedExpress to bring urgent care centers to the retail pharmacy space, may need to consider stepping up those efforts in light of overtures Amazon has made to enter the pharmacy business. So far, Walgreens and MedExpress say they’ve set up shop in 15 U.S. Walgreens locations as something of a “pilot” to see if the idea is fruitful enough to continue …
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The Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Community Care (OCC) has said publicly that it wants to help veterans gain greater access to healthcare outside of the VA system. Naturally, as part of its contracting process, the OCC requires prospective contractors who want to treat those enrollees beyond the walls of a VA facility to share a fair amount of information. A lot of it is what you’d expect: name, address, DEA number, phone, fax, National …
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The case of a woman in Colorado who played Good Samaritan to an animal she was concerned about, only to later be diagnosed with rabies, serves as a reminder that any interaction with wildlife can carry risks for disease that could require immediate treatment. For clinicians, that means remaining vigilant and asking the right questions when patients present with symptoms that may seem to appear without explanation. The Colorado woman was concerned about the welfare …
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