Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Innovation and Sustainability: Urgent Care Run School-Based Health Centers Improve Community Health

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 Click Here to download the article PDF QUICKmed Urgent Care, based in Youngstown, OH, is a prominent provider in the state’s Northeast region. Its 12 traditional urgent care centers are …

A Case-Based Exploration on How We Address High Blood Pressure Concerns in Urgent Care

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. Click Here to download the article PDF  Patients often present to urgent care with concerns about their blood pressure readings. Additionally, high blood pressure (BP) is frequently a very incidental …

Is It Time to Revisit Your Urgent Care Marketing Tactics?

Heather Real Click Here to download the article PDF 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 even have a sniffle, fever, or injury; …

In-Office Dispensing: The Good, the Bad, and the Unlikely

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 …

Differential Competitive Advantage

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 …

Changing an Employee from Full-Time to Part-Time Status

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. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc is President of Experity Consulting. 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 …

There’s No Casual Approach to Improving Antibiotic Stewardship—but When You Make the Effort, It Works

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 …

Modifier 25: What You Need to Know

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 …

Dig a little deeper

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 …

Urgent Care’s Top Hospital-Affiliated Urgent Care Operators—by Number of Locations

The makeup of the urgent care industry has changed considerably since its inception in the 1970s. At the time, it was a radical idea to see patients with nonemergent complaints on a walk-in basis. Certainly hospitals wanted no part of it; that’s what they had emergency rooms for. Rather, the UC industry’s founders tended to be in private or small group practices, but unsatisfied with how they were practicing. Over the decades that followed, it …