Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Connecticut Invests in Healthcare Workforce With New Housing Project

The city of Waterbury, Connecticut, and the state are partnering on a new affordable housing development designed to help attract and retain healthcare workers. The project will create 47 studio, 1-bedroom, and 2-bedroom units near Saint Mary’s Hospital and Waterbury Hospital, according to the local CT Mirror. Rents are expected to range from $1,000–$1,500 for households earning up to $80,000 annually. The $15 million development will receive about $11.6 million in state funding, some of …

Half of Patients ‘Always’ Follow Your Advice When Unsure About Vaccines

A new analysis conducted by the Yale School of Public Health and a global communications firm suggests that today’s vaccine hesitancy is not simply a rejection of healthcare professionals or scientific evidence. Among people surveyed who would not give their children vaccines or would only give their children only some of the recommended vaccines, personal experience was the leading influence on how the parents arrived at their vaccine views, according to the 2026 Edelman Trust …

NP, PA Roles Can Be Tough To Fill, Especially For Urgent Care

Advanced practice providers (APPs) have become increasingly important in healthcare’s overall workforce strategy, especially in urgent care. A small national survey of 327 healthcare facility leaders by CHG Healthcare found that 92% of respondents considered APPs very or extremely important to their workforce strategy, and 96% expected to maintain or increase APP utilization in 2026. The overall findings suggest that APPs are being used not simply to fill vacancies but as part of longer-term strategies …

Pregnant Women Don’t Need To Stop Inhaled Corticosteroids: Study

Clinicians can be reassured that evidence supports recommendations (eg, Global Initiative for Asthma) that pregnant women with asthma can continue use of inhaled corticosteroids (ICSs) during pregnancy, as published in JAMA Network Open. In the study of 6,105 pregnant women in South Korea, 2,108 women (34.5%) continued ICS during the first trimester and were compared to 3,997 women (65.5%) who discontinued ICS during the first trimester. Researchers found ICS continuation was not associated with significantly …

Urgent Care Beats Primary Care On Speed of Service

A survey of 1,014 U.S. healthcare consumers suggests that speed remains urgent care’s strongest competitive advantage, and it’s also the factor consumers value most, according to data from branding firm Monigle. Urgent care outperformed primary care on consumers’ perception of “help you get care quickly” (71% vs 68%), but primary care scored better on all the other measures included in the survey. The largest gaps between urgent care and primary care appeared in the ability …

Clinicians Rewrite Vast Majority of AI-Drafted Portal Messages

Researchers from Dartmouth found that when using large language models (LLMs) to draft responses to patient portal messages, clinicians may spend more time editing the AI responses than it would take to write them manually in the first place. Using more than 610,000 patient portal messages, the researchers created a training dataset of 144,000 clinician–patient conversations and tested multiple commercial and locally hosted LLMs against expert-written responses. In the study —which was presented at the …

Is It Okay For Patients To Sneak a Peek In The Portal?

Waiting for test results can be a nerve-wracking experience for patients, and many are accessing results in a portal before their clinician even gets a look. In a nationally representative survey of 4,982 U.S. adults, 68.6% of respondents said they viewed their test results through a patient portal before hearing from their healthcare practitioner. Among those who viewed results first, 6.6% reported poor understanding of what the results showed and what they meant for their …

Many Physicians Lack Reliable Resources For Language Interpretation

For patients with limited English proficiency (LEP), a healthcare visit can be somewhat frustrating for them and for their clinician. That’s why several federal laws require certain healthcare entities to offer interpreter services. A survey of 230 primary care physicians recently published in JAMA Network Open revealed that only 50.4% of respondents regularly used at least 1 type of professional medical interpreter, while 53.0% regularly relied on ad hoc interpreters, such as family members or …

What Could Possibly Replace CPT Codes? CMS Is Asking.

The nonprofit PatientRightsAdvocate.org (PRA) has filed a lawsuit against the American Medical Association (AMA) seeking to make Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes available to the public and health organizations free of charge, according to an announcement. Federal law requires healthcare entities to use CPT for Medicare claims, and most payer policies—including among state Medicaid programs—use CPT codes for billing as well. AMA has held the copyright for CPT since 1966, and it charges organizations for …

NP Workforce Growing Quickly, While Physicians Remain Steady

A new analysis in Health Affairs estimates that the U.S. clinician workforce will continue to shift through 2030 with nurse practitioners (NPs) representing the fastest-growing segment. The number of full-time physicians is expected to increase by only about 1% annually, compared with 5.6% growth for physician assistants/associates (PAs) and 11% growth for NPs. By 2030, the combined number of NPs and PAs is projected to grow to 912,265 workers—almost the size of the physician workforce …

« Previous

Login to JUCM