Practice Management
Urgent message: When considering growth in urgent care, there are both advantages and challenges to acquiring an existing urgent care center vs developing a completely new business. Heather Real The urgent care industry is ever-evolving and flexing to meet the needs of patients and communities. This means the way operators enter the industry needs to be flexible, too. While starting a new business in a freshly outfitted space in a growing part of town is …
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Download the article PDF: Urgent Care’s Top 100—by Number of Locations If urgent care had a family tree, it would show an ancestry rich in physicians with a pioneer spirit—individuals who wanted to find a way of practicing medicine that they believed to be more sensible, efficient, and economical while still offering excellent clinical care. Based on the decades that followed, up through today and beyond it’s safe to say the “experiment” has been an …
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David Gahtan MS, PA-C and Joshua Russell, MD, MSc, FCUCM, FACEP Whether we like it or not, electronic medical records are here to stay. And their takeover has been swift. Over recent decades, the EMR has gone from an obscure, bare-bones, often clunky digital notepad to a ubiquitous and powerful tool which tracks enormous amounts of patient data. To continue to practice medicine, we’ve had no choice but to go along for the ride. It’s …
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One of the key “selling” points of urgent care has always been that if patients who don’t have limb- or life-threatening concerns are able to get acute care someplace other than the emergency room, they would go there, thereby lowering cost, wait times, and risk associated with the ED. Now there’s evidence to support the first part of this premise, thanks to a new report from Mesirow Investment Banking. As seen in the graph below, …
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Download the PDF: The Best Time to Plant a Tree Urgent Care is definitely ready to start Driving Change again. The pandemic taught us how to be in crisis-response mode all day every day, to roll with wave after wave after wave of external changes, to constantly pivot and adapt, to maintain a furious pace because our communities needed us to. It also diminished opportunities to improve other skills—longer-term thinking, broader-scope planning, finer-tuning on quality …
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Download PDF: End of the Public Health Emergency: What’s Next? With expiration of the national Public Health Emergency (PHE) as of May 11, the revenue cycle management (RCM) industry has to adjust to the “new normal.” Some emergency declarations were tied to the end of the PHE and others are not. While not a comprehensive list, I’ve outlined some of the most urgent care-relevant changes below. Payers Coverage for COVID-19 Testing, Treatments, and Vaccines During …
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Urgent message: In December 2022, Congress passed the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment Act (W-Waiver), which would remove federal patient caps and allow any healthcare provider with a standard DEA controlled-medication license to prescribe buprenorphine. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc is Senior Editor of The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine and President of Experity Consulting. For over a decade, the question of whether or not to prescribe buprenorphine/naloxone (Suboxone) products in urgent care has resurfaced with regularity. With …
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Download the PDF: Are Urgent Care Providers Liable if They Don’t Test Patients for COVID? Urgent message: As the severity of newer strains of SARS-CoV-2 has decreased, many patients and providers have become less vigilant about COVID-19. Yet COVID-19 remains among the top 10 causes of death in the U.S. Failure to diagnose and, if eligible, treat patients with COVID-19 may result in significant harm. Professional liability is less likely, however, given the current governmental …
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Download the PDF: The 10-Year Trend on UC Claim Lines Is Strong—in the City and in the Country . Believe it or not, just a decade ago urgent care accounted for barely 6% of all claim lines in the United States. There was little difference between rural and urban settings, too. New research from FAIR Health1 shows that the picture changed dramatically in 2015, though, as the percentage of claim lines attributed to urgent care …
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Urgent message: Urgent care operators must be mindful of costs and labor efficiency to navigate the challenges of rising and falling revenue in what’s been a highly seasonal business. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc, is President of Experity Consulting and is Senior Editor of The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine. For much of 2020 and 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic drove both uncertainty and higher volumes (and thus profits) to urgent care centers. With the 2022-2023 …
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