Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Who in a Company Can Bind the Company in a Contract?

Urgent message: While legal documents may define who in an urgent care is able to legally obligate the company, such as when ordering a service or signing a contract, there are cases where “unauthorized” individuals can still bind the company—meaning the organization must have clear internal policies on signing authority. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Let’s say that a physician employed at an urgent care facility is working on a Saturday when a toilet backs …

Billing for Midlevels: Your Questions Answered

One of the biggest challenges for urgent care practices is staffing. Midlevels are a great solution. As states pass laws giving midlevels more autonomy to compensate for physician shortages, however, there is some confusion on how to bill for these providers’ services. I will attempt to answer some of your billing questions. Do I need to credential my midlevels? Yes and no. This is dependent on your contract. For some group contracts, any new provider …

COVID-19: New Zealand’s Urgent Care Story

Stephen L. Adams, MBChB, FRNZCUC Like the rest of the world, New Zealand (and more particularly its healthcare system) has been changed, perhaps irrevocably, by COVID-19. Despite a relatively small direct effect on the population (0.06% infected, half of which were identified and isolated at border) with 0.0004% deaths1 (including one physician), the effects on primary care have been substantial. THE BEGINNING New Zealand clinicians were first notified of the Wuhan cluster in January 2020. …

Will Urgent Care Visits return to ‘Normal’ as the Pandemic Turns Endemic?

In spite of the fact that urgent care was overlooked as an essential partner in the fight against COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic, the virus had a major impact on the complaints that drove patients to visit an urgent care center. In fact, according to JUCM research, most of 2019’s top 5 chief complaints fell by at least half as a proportion of all urgent care visits. COVID-19, which was essentially a …

ICD-10 Changes for 2022

Every year on October 1, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the National Center for Health Statistics release an updated ICD-10-CM Official Guidelines, as well as changes to the code set. This year there are 159 new codes, 32 deleted codes, and 20 revised codes, with a total of 72,748 codes to choose from. (Visit ICD-10-CM Official Guidelines for Coding and Reporting FY 2022 at https://www.cms.gov/files/document/fy-2022-icd-10-cm-coding-guidelines.pdf to see the entire document.) Three …

Counterpoint: Readers React to JUCM Original Research

Andrew Grock, MD; Manuel Celedon, MD; and Jonie Hsiao, MD It was with great interest that we read Most Clinicians Are Still Not Comfortable Sending Chest Pain Patients Home with a Very Low Risk of 30-day Major Adverse Cardiac Event (MACE) by Dr. Michael Weinstock, et al in the February 2021 issue of JUCM.1 In this study, the authors surveyed attendants at an emergency medicine conference in 2018 as to their comfort level discharging patients …

Addressing Fraternization in the Urgent Care Workplace

Urgent message: Whereas sexual harassment is defined as unwanted and one-sided, many times employees choose to become romantically involved, requiring that urgent care centers have a policy and a plan to address workplace fraternization. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc is President of Experity Networks and is Practice Management Editor of The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine. In 2019, McDonald’s fired its Chief Executive Steve Easterbrook for engaging in a relationship that violated company policy. The …

Telehealth Use Is Down from Its Peak—But the New Plateau Is Far Higher Than Pre-Pandemic Levels

Patients were more willing to use telehealth than ever in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to data from a report published by McKinsey & Company, telehealth claims grew 7,800% between February 2020 and April 2020. They dropped precipitously just a couple of months later, but have since plateaued. What could be of interest to urgent care operators who are considering telehealth as a service option, especially as we’re in the midst of …

Getting Served: The Do’s and Don’ts of Litigation

Upon returning home from a busy urgent care shift, you notice a certified letter with a law firm’s return address. You open the letter and realize you are being sued in the case of a 26-year-old woman you saw almost a year ago. As your heart beats harder, you think about returning to the urgent care to pull up the chart. You wonder who you should call (the medical director, the insurance company…?) Should you …

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