Practice

Though as a country we’re in far better shape in regard to COVID-19 than we’ve been in a very long time, risk of infection remains a serious concern in healthcare practices. While masking has been accepted as an essential component in lowering risk, research just published by JAMA Network Open reveals there’s a marked difference in risk for infection among healthcare workers who wear one type of mask vs another. According to an observational study …

Irate, distraught, or possibly impaired patients and close relations have been known to lash out at the very people trying to render care in high-stress situations in hospitals and urgent care centers. That’s never ok, obviously, but of even greater concern is how often healthcare workers are subjected to violence or other forms of abuse from their own colleagues. According to a report recently published by Medscape, 44% of physicians say they’ve witnessed other providers …

As cases of monkeypox swelled to more than 14,000 in the United States—including the first case concerning a minor, in New York—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported evidence that monkeypox virus DNA can survive on surfaces for at least 20 days. State health workers in Utah found virus on 70% of 30 specimens swabbed from cloth furniture, blankets, handles, and switches in a home where patients had been isolating for 20 days. Both …

When six people were shot sometime after midnight in Memphis this Tuesday, the impact on the nearest hospital was a bit more complicated than preparing for multiple patients with traumatic injuries. Methodist North Hospital—located just a stone’s throw from the crime scene—was actually shut down for a time in the wake of the violence, with the clinical team dispatched to treat patients with gunshot wounds while other staff had to route incoming patients away from …

It’s been well-documented that the COVID-19 pandemic has been hard on clinicians, to the point that burnout is affecting more physicians, nurses, and advanced practice providers than ever. A viewpoint piece just published by the Journal of the American Medical Association draws back the curtain on another portion of your workforce whose own stresses over the past couple of years. Considering increased turnover among all healthcare workers between April and December 2020 and drawing on …

As urgent care continues its resurgence from a couple of years in which patient volumes were  precariously low and the healthcare landscape in general was turned upside down, it may be wise to remember what patients came to value about this setting in the first. Key among the attributes, historically, has been convenience. FIERCE Healthcare just published an article connecting the dots between wait times for medical care and patient satisfaction. The worst-case scenario cited …

While it’s a bit unclear exactly whom it applies to at this point, Los Angeles just passed an ordinance mandating that workers at “certain private healthcare facilities” earn a minimum wage of $25 an hour. The question is which facilities that label will apply to in the eyes of the city. Some of them are straightforward in the language of the ordinance—licensed acute psychiatric hospital as defined in Section 1250(b) of the California Health and …

For most urgent care visits, the ball is in the patient’s hand. They feel sick and can’t wait for their primary care physician or in the emergency room, so they head to your location. There are times when the urgent care operator may want to reverse roles, though, and get in touch with patients, such as to remind them it’s time for a vaccination. According to research just published by JAMA Network Open, texting has …

JUCM noted some time ago that the COVID-19 pandemic has been taking a toll on urgent care workers (see The COVID-19 Pandemic Is Making Burnout Worse for Physicians Already in Crisis). Now a new report published by JAMA Network Open is providing data bearing that out—along with a possibly surprising nuance. Childcare challenges and other issues related to the pandemic have amounted to increased stress and burnout, leaving an ever-growing number of healthcare providers looking …

A new rule (effective July 1) from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services now requires health insurance and self-insured employers to post the rates they’ve negotiated with providers. While that could mean unprecedented public access to what was previously eyes-only for insurance industry insiders, the catch is that data posted as *.json (JavaScript Object Notation) files can only be machine-read—essentially making the data inaccessible to all but academics and professionals. So, Alan Ayers, MBA, MAcc, …