Practice Management
Click Here to download the article PDF There’s been a lot of deep thinking around here lately. The questions we’ve been pondering have been with us for a long time, but often the answers don’t fully emerge when we want them to. They emerge when the moment is right. And sometimes, it takes new questions, or the same questions asked in a different way at a slightly different time or by a different person, for …
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Urgent message: By leveraging grant funding, community-facing services, and a collaborative model with school districts, QUICKmed Urgent Care operates a successful school-based health center model. This innovative approach addresses healthcare gaps in underserved areas and augments the operator’s core business. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc QUICKmed Urgent Care, based in Youngstown, OH, is a prominent provider in the state’s Northeast region. Its 12 traditional urgent care centers are an important resource for the communities it …
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Joanne P. Parker, MD Urgent message: High blood pressure is a common incidental finding in urgent care. Distinguishing patients who may need treatment from those who should be advised to follow up for further evaluation is well within the urgent care provider’s field of expertise. Download the article PDF: A Case-Based Exploration on How We Address High Blood Pressure Concerns in Urgent Care Patients often present to urgent care with concerns about their blood pressure …
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Heather Real Download the article PDF: Is It Time to Revisit Your Urgent Care Marketing Tactics? In the journey of an urgent care visit, where does the patient story begin? Is it when the patient walks through the door, or did it start when the patient was still at home Googling “urgent care near me” on their phone? It is likely neither of these. The patient journey to your urgent care actually begins before they …
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On paper (so to speak), in-office prescribing in the urgent care center would seem to be a no-brainer for all concerned: patients could avoid the time-consuming hassles of navigating the retail drugstore morass and head straight home with their medication, and providers could be assured that their patients got the right medication in a timely manner and could be the responsible parties to answer any questions they may have—all while collecting a modest profit. That’s …
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In the May issue of JUCM, Josh Russell wrote in his Letter from the Editor-in-Chief about thinking differently about follow-up. If you are not a physician, physician assistant or nurse practitioner and decided to skip his letter that month because it seemed too clinical, I urge you to go back and read it. One of the aspects of Urgent Care that separates us from other kinds of healthcare operations—or used to—is the tight collaboration between …
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Urgent message: Whether due to reduced staffing needs or employee preference, some employees in urgent care are no longer scheduled for full-time hours. Changing from full-time to part-time status, however, may have consequences beyond simply working fewer hours. There are any number of reasons why an urgent care owner or operator might want to change the status of an employee from full-time to part-time. Generally speaking, an employer is permitted to do so for any …
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Improving antibiotic stewardship was an industry-wide mandate even before a 2018 study indicated that urgent care appeared to be more likely than other settings to overprescribe for common infections. While the methodologies could be questioned, especially in their take on the nature of urgent care visits, the point was well taken. Since then, urgent care as a whole has sought to improve providers’ prescribing habits more aggressively than ever. The initial awareness campaigns did a …
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Phyllis Dobberstein, CPC, CPMA, CPCO, CEMC, CCC Modifier 25 is used to indicate a significant, separately identifiable evaluation and management (E/M) service was required on the day of a minor surgical procedure. The procedure performed must have a global period of 0 or 10 days. An example of this is a laceration repair. Modifier 25 is overused in the industry and has been under scrutiny from payers for decades. Now private payers are implementing policies …
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Tracey Quail Davidoff, MD, FCUCM I was scanning the tracking board during an urgent care shift the other day and, as usual, my brain was five steps ahead. I read the chief complaints and had already determined the questions I’d ask to guide the history based on the differential diagnoses I’d predicted. This is a regular occurrence in the UC and ED, whether we admit it or not. It’s part of how we move things …
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