Practice Management Articles

Urgent Message: Urgent care sends roughly 1 patient in 50 to the emergency department. Most of those referrals involve symptoms that call for imaging, laboratory testing, or monitoring that the clinic cannot provide. Some are emergencies identified during the visit for an ordinary complaint. Keywords: emergency department referral; emergency department transfer; urgent care referral patterns; practice variation; clinical documentation; urgent care operations Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Consider a scenario in which a patient writes a scathing online review after paying his co-pay and waiting at an urgent care, only …
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Urgent Message: Urgent care operators may find practice variation in testing, imaging, referral, and coding among clinicians working in the same clinic. According to this data analysis, the reason for variation ultimately comes down to the decision making of the individual clinician rather than infrastructure, payer, or patient population. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Keywords: urgent care practice variation; provider variation; clinical practice patterns; diagnostic testing; referral patterns; evaluation and management coding; clinician performance Walk into any 2 urgent care centers operating under the same banner, and you would expect …
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Urgent Message: To protect clinic continuity and avoid financial liabilities, urgent care operators must master the complex, overlapping patchwork of federal and state employee-leave laws to navigate paid-time-off traps, callouts, and defensible terminations. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Keywords: Family and Medical Leave Act; paid sick leave; paid time off; employee absence management; Americans with Disabilities Act; attendance policy The regulatory environment governing employee absence in the United States is a complex, overlapping patchwork of federal, state, and municipal laws. For urgent care operators—who must maintain precise staffing ratios—understanding the …
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Urgent Message: Health systems must reframe urgent care from a low-margin cost center to a strategic front door that drives significant returns by utilizing technology to track and maximize “keepage”—the retention of high-value downstream referrals that otherwise leak out of the network. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Keywords: urgent care; referral management; downstream revenue; health system strategy; patient retention; return on investment Urgent care is no longer just an access point; it is the strategic front door to the health system. For many health systems, urgent care centers operate on …
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Urgent Message: This 50-state framework details who can legally operate x-ray equipment, as these laws dictate whether the industry’s predominant advanced practice provider-staffing model remains operationally and financially viable. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Keywords: urgent care; radiography; radiologic technologists; licensure; nurse practitioners; physician assistants According to the Urgent Care Association (UCA), on-site plain-film radiography is a defining feature of urgent care and is among the criteria for UCA Certification.¹ Yet across the 50 states and the District of Columbia, the regulations governing who may operate that equipment vary so …
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