Practice Management
The U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission tells us we can expect a spike in emergency room visits on or around the Independence Day holiday next week. If you’ve done a good job of alerting your community to the fact that many ED-bound patients could be treated just as well (not to mention faster and less expensively) in your urgent care center, that means you can expect to see more traffic, too. Make sure your holiday …
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The ink is barely dry on agreements allowing more telemedicine than ever before, but there are indications that some corners of the healthcare marketplace are already moving on toward The Next Big Thing: text-based medical encounters. A Denver-based startup called CirrusMD has pulled together $7 million in capital it plans to devote to expanding what’s thought to be the industry’s first “text-first” workflow. CirrusMD has cut its teeth on working with large health systems and …
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Here’s what we know: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is going to stop including Social Security numbers on Medicare ID cards. Here’s what we don’t know: How this is going to work, and how it’s going to affects healthcare providers. The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act requires CMS to remove Social Security numbers from Medicare cards due to increasing risk for identity theft and fraud. The year-long process of issuing new …
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The weather is warm, schools are getting out, and people are venturing off into the wild for outdoor adventure—and to face the perils of tick-infested woods and fields. Visits to urgent care sparked by fear of tick-borne illnesses are sure to follow. In addition to well-known (though still relatively uncommon) diagnoses like Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever, the newly identified Human Powassan (POW) virus can be deadly in some cases. Its symptoms are …
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Urgent care operators who have been waiting for the elusive “right time” to start offering telemedicine might want to keep an eye out for hospital closures in their area—especially if those hospitals have been providing care where there aren’t many other options. A new study by the Texas A & M Rural and Community Health highlights telemedicine as a viable, and valuable, alternative for care when hospitals shutter their doors. The researchers even went so …
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It’s been more than a year since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that opioids not be used to treat chronic back pain. Unfortunately, too many prescribers have yet to get the message, according to new data from an NPR-Truven Health Analytics Health Poll. The data, reflecting the experiences of 3,002 patients participating in a telephone survey, show that 40% of the visits to a doctor for low back pain ended with a …
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An urgent care center in Los Angeles is offering to check qualified patients for sexually transmitted disease at no cost. The plan is part of Vermont Urgent Care’s goal to expand their offerings to include sexual health services—but it’s also a great way to introduce themselves to patients who may not have visited the clinic before. Urgent care centers, in general, have become popular among patients who think they may need to get checked for …
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Here’s the scenario: Your clinic opens at 8. A nonclinical staff member arrives at 7:50, only to find a woman in distress waiting at the locked front door, complaining of chest pains and shortness of breath and heading toward a full-blown panic. You hope your staffer would: Let the patient in immediately, then call the first clinician scheduled to work to see how close they are to arriving Let the patient in immediately and call …
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A new study by Safe Kids Worldwide reveals more than 400,000 children are injured in bike, scooter, skateboard, and roller blade accidents every year. Now that wheels of every variety are coming out of the garage for the first time in months, there’s an opportunity to stress your urgent care center’s vital role in community health and safety—before and after injuries occur. First, ask patients if they’re planning to make good on promises to get …
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Growing investment by service providers, occupational medicine companies, and entrepreneurs, along with wider acceptance by health plans, seems to confirm that telemedicine is no longer the Next Big Thing, but a newly essential service that urgent care operators need to consider offering. Most recently, U.S. HealthWorks announced that it’s launching a comprehensive telemedicine program called USHW CareConnectNOW, which will link patients to state-licensed medical providers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So far, …
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