Practice Management
Florida, Michigan, and Tennessee are the latest states to enact legislation aimed at limiting the amount of opioid medications physicians can prescribed at any one time for acute pain. In Michigan, prescribers cannot write more than a 7-day supply; Florida draws the line at 3 days and makes physicians and pharmacists consult the state prescription drug monitoring database to review a patient’s prescription history. Tennessee let’s pharmacists fill only half the amount of opioids a …
Read More
Summertime means more leisure time for most Americans, and the warmer weather can serve as a welcome invitation to enjoy outdoor activities that are inaccessible during much of the year. It’s also a great time to let residents in your area (and visitors from out of town, for that matter) know your capabilities to assist with seasonal health concerns. The operators of Mercy Urgent Care know western North Carolina is an appealing destination for hikers—and …
Read More
Innovation is a word indivisible from the growth of the urgent care industry; the practice setting itself is a step forward in the evolution of primary care. And it keeps growing and improving all the time, thanks to pioneers who still see the potential in offering a higher-acuity version of primary care-type services on a walk-in basis—and work to realize it in a timely and cost-effective manner. The thing about evolution that’s sometimes forgotten is …
Read More
Medicaid patients who go to the ED with what is later deemed to be a “minor or nonemergency case.” While the bill’s sponsor, Assemblyman Louis Greenwald, says it is designed to save the state and taxpayers money, provider organizations and hospitals are obviously not happy. Some 1.8 million residents get coverage through Medicaid, according to state reports, with patients in the fee-for-service managed-care program accounting for about 5% of that number. If the law takes …
Read More
Legislation under consideration by Massachusetts lawmakers purports to help patients gain access to quality care more easily—the actual title of the bill is the Act to Enhance Access to High Quality, Affordable and Transparent Healthcare, after all. Critics are concerned that it will actually have the opposite effect when it comes to urgent care, however, citing several components of the bill as currently written: An 8.75% tax on the total dollar amount of an urgent …
Read More
A new post from PatientEngagementHIT.com (PEH) identifies urgent care as one of the “emerging players allowing patients to connect to care outside of a doctor’s office hours,” a key benefit at a time when access to care is getting more challenging all the time. PEH emphasizes four broad areas in which progress could be made to help patients get to see the clinicians that would be best suited for their current complaints in a timely, …
Read More
Telemedicine has been hyped as a savior for both patients with poor access to quality local healthcare and operators who want to increase revenue by providing that care. Business has not exactly been booming for most, however, possibly due to lack of awareness among the public or slow adoption by payers. As competition for patients heats up among various segments of the provider landscape, however, there may be a bigger push to capture patients who …
Read More
When they asked prolific criminal Willie Sutton why he robbed banks, he allegedly replied simply, “That’s where the money is.” To flip the question, if all your patients (and prospective new patients) are on social media, why aren’t you doing more to seek them out there? Answers on how to remedy that will be offered in a free webinar to be hosted by the Urgent Care Association (UCA) on Thursday, July 19, 1–2 pm, Central. …
Read More
An urgent care operator in upstate New York has agreed to pay $110,000 to settle charges that it submitted false claims to Medicare. The U.S. Attorney for the region alleged that between January 2013 and October 2015 the company billed over 99% of its Medicare fees as if services had been provided or supervised directly by a physician, even though at least some of them had been provided by advanced practice providers (ie, nurse practitioners …
Read More
Atlantic Health System and MedExpress have forged a partnership to coordinate care among 11 MedExpress neighborhood medical centers and Atlantic Health System’s network of physicians, hospitals, and other care sites in northern New Jersey. The aim is to guide more MedExpress urgent care patients to an Atlantic Health System facility when further care beyond the urgent care setting is needed. Conversely, MedExpress locations will act as an extension of Atlantic Health System for urgent care …
Read More