Practice

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, …

It’s unlikely that patients visiting an urgent care center read every word of every document they have to sign before they can actually see a provider. They just want to get in and get relief from whatever complaint motivated them to be there as fast as possible So, they may be a little alarmed when ads for products that somehow relate to the discussion they had with the provider in the privacy of the exam …

JUCM News readers may recall controversy concerning the COVID-19 Test to Treat process, wherein pharmacists were singled out as providers qualified to participate in a speech by President Biden, followed quickly by a clarification from the Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response that urgent care centers who meet the relevant criteria may also qualify to participate. That was far from a one-off when looking at pharmacists being granted …

You’re closed for the day. Maybe you’ve just sat down to dinner or are burning the midnight oil in your home office. Then the call comes: the fire department is at your urgent care center, working to extinguish flames that started in the building next door. Unfortunately, such a scenario was not hypothetical for Concentra Urgent Care in Santee, CA as a two-alarm fire swept through its commercial building recently. No one was injured, as …

Healthcare facilities have seen violence against workers and patients in the U.S. recently, begging the question as to whether there is any level of protection that is both reasonable and sufficient to ensure the safety of all on site. First four people in Tulsa, OK—two physicians, a receptionist, and a patient—were shot to death by a disgruntled patient and then days later a man walked into an Encino, CA emergency room and stabbed a physician …

For all the discussion and outreach efforts (including in JUCM and JUCM News) to warn healthcare facilities that burnout is a serious threat to providers and, consequently, patients, the problem has become so widespread that U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy, MD, MBA writes that it has become a “crisis that is now affecting not only healthcare workers, but the communities they serve.” His department’s report, Addressing Health Worker Burnout—The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on …