Practice Management
Nearly 2 million Americans have an opioid use disorder. While there are many causative factors behind that staggering number, Steven J. Stack, MD, president of the American Medical Association, says “the opioid epidemic…far too often has started from a prescription pad.” In an open letter to all physicians in every setting across the country, Stack proposed seven steps physicians can take to help reverse the tide: “Avoid initiating opioids for new patients with chronic noncancer …
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Overlook the simple things, and all the technology and medication in the world won’t keep patients—or healthcare providers—healthy. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just launched a campaign called Clean Hands Count, aimed at preventing healthcare-associated infections through basic hygiene practices in all healthcare settings, including urgent care. One common misconception the program aims to correct: that antibiotic hand sanitizers are the safest. Rather, use of antibiotic-based cleansers increases the risk of antibiotic resistance; …
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The Food and Drug Administration is asking healthcare professionals to stop administering drug products intended to be sterile that were made by Medaus Inc. due to a lack of sterility assurance. Providers in all settings, including urgent care, are urged to check their supplies and quarantine any “sterile” products from Medaus. Some of the drugs (eg, injectable nutritional products) are more likely to be found in urgent care centers than others, such as injectable hormone …
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Physicians who prescribe opioid pain medications would have to undergo a higher level of specific training under a guidance recommended by a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel. In response to a perceived epidemic of opioid addiction and related deaths, the panel voted unanimously to advice requiring more education about the drugs’ risks. The panel’s vote was unanimous, but not binding—though the FDA does often follow recommendations made by its outside expert panels.
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Patient advocates and regulators at every level decry that a lack of price transparency often leads to patients getting bigger bills than they expected after leaving a doctor’s office. However, a new study published in Health Affairs calls the actual value of price transparency tools into question—if for no other reason than it’s unclear how often patients would actually use such a tool. Researchers looked at how a population of Aetna members fared using that …
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Most patients who gave their healthcare providers low scores after an encounter did so because of perceived bad service, not poor medical care, according to a new study published in the Journal of Medical Practice Management. In fact, 96% of complaints in an analysis of 35,000 online reviews were related mainly to communication and wait times. Just 1 in 25 patients who gave their provider one or two stars (on a five-star scale) said they …
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One urgent care center’s competition is another center’s opportunity. In this case, Lexington, SC-based Doctor’s Care is finding that telemedicine is increasing patient satisfaction and reducing wait times, not keeping potential customers away from its clinics. The key is that the company facilitates the virtual visits on both ends: If one center is unusually busy and another has no wait time, the patient who is already on site at location A has the option of …
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Virtual medicine works better for some presenting complaints than others—and varies widely by provider—according to a new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine. Researchers looked at how eight provider companies performed in recognizing, ordering tests, and diagnosing treatment for six common conditions. Though the study was not designed with urgent care in mind, the presentations included reflect common reasons for urgent care visits. Diagnostic accuracy was highest for recurrent female urinary tract infection (91%) and …
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Use a prescription pad in New York, go to jail—potentially, anyway, as the state becomes only the second state to require electronic prescribing and the first to establish penalties, which include fines, loss of license, and even jail time, for noncompliance. Paper and telephone prescriptions will be exempted for emergency situations, however. Proponents reason that e-prescribing is a big step toward eliminating prescribing errors and long wait times at the pharmacy, and that it reduces …
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Just a week after issuing its previous advisory, the Centers for Disease Control is already refining recommended precautions men and women need to take before engaging in sexual contact or attempting to conceive. Men with potential exposure (ie, travel or residence in an active outbreak area) should not engage in unprotected sex for at least 8 weeks after the exposure ends. Advice to use condoms or abstain from sex also applies to currently pregnant women …
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