Practice Management
As JUCM News readers know, after years of spending billions on initiatives to break into the primary care market, retail drug chains have taken one step after another in the opposite direction. Just last week we pointed you to an article published by Home Health Care News that revealed home care has become the flavor of the month for some chains. Well, it may literally be the same month but there’s already another flavor on …
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Patients who are part of the LGBTQI+ communities are notoriously underserved by the healthcare industry in the United States. You’re probably already aware of that. Have you considered, however, that actually demonstrating your support for such patients could also go a long way toward building loyalty, goodwill, and security among staff members? To that end, the Urgent Care Association is choosing Pride Month, which is observed every June, to make the urgent care industry aware …
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Point32Health, parent company of Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare, is just the latest healthcare entity to fall prey to cyberattacks, having acknowledged that it was hit with a ransomware attack that left patient and provider data exposed. As reported by WBZ CBS Boston, some providers have also missed being paid on care they provided to Harvard Pilgrim plan members. One such psychologist was quoted in the WBZ story as likening the cyber world to “the Wild West” …
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Fact: Ketamine (Ketalar) is a legal, approved medication available in the United States as an anesthetic agent indicated for diagnostic and surgical procedures that do not require skeletal muscle relaxation; for induction of anesthesia preceding general anesthesia; and to supplement low-potency agents such as nitrous oxide. It’s also used as an anesthetic agent for animals. More ominous fact: Seizures of illicit ketamine rose 1,100% from 2017 to 2022. Maybe worst of all, a newsletter article …
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The COVID-19 pandemic could have ushered in a golden age for telemedicine. In fact, many healthcare facilities (urgent care centers among them) bent over backwards to get their digital game up to speed so they could offer patients care safely, if remotely, when there may not have been any other options at all. Despite that opportunity, according to a new report from Experian Health, telehealth still looks like a less-than-ideal entry point into healthcare. The …
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The evolution of urgent care could be likened to a crusade. In the early days there were few believers, and those physicians who did dare to open up an urgent care center were derided as a “doc in a box.” Now, of course, venture capitalists and healthcare systems have verified the viability of the industry as a profit center. But some of the early skeptics have become some of the most vocal advocates of the …
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As regular readers know, JUCM is unique in that it regularly publishes original, urgent care-specific research. Most (if not all) of that research has been conducted by urgent care providers and operators. Historically, however, urgent care has been all but invisible to mainstream medical researchers. There are indications that could be changing, however, as lately there have been several pieces of research conducted not by urgent care entities, but more traditional bodies that are using …
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Who knows what the next COVID-19 “season” may bring in terms of incidence and severity? The virus has been completely unpredictable, to date—although new data are revealing interesting likelihoods, including at least one specific to urgent care. According to a new article published by BMC Infectious Diseases, COVID patients who present to acute unscheduled episodic care (AUEC, which included both emergency rooms and urgent care centers) are more likely to require hospitalization compared with those …
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Retail chains like CVS and Walgreens have plopped down billions of dollars to try to capture a piece of the primary care marketplace. It hasn’t gone well. So, as noted in a new article published by Home Health Care News, they’re trying a different, less competitive approach: home care. In the case of CVS Health, that meant again digging deep to buy an established enterprise, specifically Signify Health. And they’re open to buying more such …
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It’s unlikely anyone working in your urgent care center would post confidential patient information online, even while venting about an especially tough day at work. Unfortunately, it’s not an impossibility, however, so a timely reminder to the team may be in order. If you need evidence of that, consider a suit filed against a hospital in Oregon alleging that an employee took—and shared online—photos of a burn victim being treated there. He died of his …
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