Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

When Coding, Remember: ‘Necessity’ Is in the Eye of the Beholder

Providers are employing evaluation and management (E/M) code 99214 more than ever—and seeing fewer denials and higher reimbursements than in the past, ultimately. That doesn’t mean it’s open season on the higher level code (and associated higher reimbursements), however; documenting medical necessity sufficiently is still critical to ensuring the code is valid compared with the reigning most common code (99213). Operators must ensure coders understand that while a level 3 visit requires one to three …

Helping the Student Body Stay Healthy Helps Your Business

Colleges (not to mention nervous moms and dads) probably do everything they can to ensure that students know where the infirmary or student health center is located. While that’s clearly important, hours of operation tend to me somewhat limited. Students, especially those who may away from home for the first time, need to have a back-up plan when injury or illness strikes—and your urgent care center should be part of it. Ensure that it is …

Check Your Clinic for OTC Soaps Purported to be ‘Antibacterial’

Urgent care operators that offer over-the-counter soaps marked as “antibacterial” in restrooms or other public areas should be aware that such products can no longer be marketed in the U.S., thanks to a new ruling by the Food and Drug Administration. Sharp-eyed (and certainly germaphobic) patients and other visitors to your urgent care center may take umbrage with signage or containers making claims that the soaps are antibacterial. The FDA made the decision after a …

Back-to-School Shouldn’t Mean Back Pain

If parents bring in young children complaining of acute back pain, try taking a history that might be just a little more detailed than usual before ordering expensive images or referring. Actually, focusing on one specific question might reveal the answer: Did the onset of pain coincide with the start of the school year? If the answer is “yes,” ask for a detailed list of what goes into the child’s backpack every morning, and how …

Urgent Care Workflows Defy Dire Headlines for Other Settings

Recent headlines make the problem crystal clear—“For Each Hour of Clinical Time, Docs Spend 2 on Desk Work” from MedPage Today is a good example—but they don’t tell the whole story, at least where urgent care is concerned. The current hubbub stems from a study published in Annals of Internal Medicine that reveals physicians in ambulatory care settings spend almost 2 hours on clerical tasks for every single hour they spend with patients. Even in …

Free Urgent Care Webinar Explores Deadly Combination

With preparations already underway for the 2016–2017 flu season, this is an ideal time to look further into the correlation between pneumonia and influenza—especially in urgent care, where respiratory illness is the number-one diagnosis code recorded. Pneumonia is the most common complication of influenza, and leads to significant morbidity and mortality, with the elderly and patients with comorbid conditions being most at risk. Glenn Harnett, MD will lead a discussion of this deadly combination in …

New California Bill Protects Patients from ‘Surprise’ Medical Fees

California residents who have to visit out-of-network medical providers will get much-needed economic protection under a new bill just passed by state legislators. The bipartisan bill, AB72, assures that patients who received care in in-network facilities would have to pay only in-network cost sharing, regardless of whether the provider who treated the patient is in-network or out-of-network. This would not apply to self-insured employer health plans, however, which are shielded from state regulations by the …

Editorialist: Freestanding ERs May Be Hurting Patients

Well-informed media pundits are catching on to what urgent care insiders—among others—have been saying for some time now: freestanding emergency rooms may be able to provide necessary treatment in most situations, but overall are not contributing to efficient, appropriate patient care. One newspaper editorialist in Texas puts the question in very simple terms: “Are they good for patients?” Writing in the Dallas Morning News , Brett Berrett lays out his rationale for answering his own …

Offering Urgent Care ‘Subscriptions’ May Boost Patient Engagement

We’ve mentioned here that healthcare costs and physician shortages could amount to an opportunity for creative urgent care businesses. Valley Immediate Care in Oregon is the latest operator to adopt an increasingly popular strategy to take advantage of that opportunity: low-cost “subscription” healthcare services, in this case marketed under the name My Urgent Care 365. Individual subscriptions cost $40 a month and entitle the subscriber to three visits annually, with a $25 urgent care fee. …

Workplace Cell Phone Policies Should Be Reasonable—but Firm

In today’s “connected” world, few of us can go hours without checking our email, text messages, and social media posts. The same is true for urgent care center providers and staff. However, when patients see employees chatting or texting on their cell phones, they can get the impression that the focus is on the employee’s personal concerns and not patient care. For an employer, this behavior represents lost on the clock productivity, with the opportunity …