Practice Management
Heather Rothermel When considering contracting for your clinic, it will be important to know how you plan to market your clinic and to ensure that you align with the needs of your community. Will you be a primary care practice, an urgent care practice, or a blended practice? Thoroughly analyzing your market and competition should help guide this decision, but there is a bevy of things to consider—everything from contract type, credentialing requirements, reimbursement methodologies, …
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Ivan Koay MBChB, MRCS, FRNZCUC, MD Optimal team dynamics play a key role in productivity and enterprise success. The importance of a well-functioning team is evident every day in urgent care centers (UCCs). Increasingly, rapid turnover of UC staff is becoming normative, and changes in team composition can have significant impact on how well a team functions. Whether from daily shift changes or staff joining or leaving the organization, such changes require adaptations both for …
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Here at the Urgent Care Association (UCA), we often used to ask ourselves, “Is this a UCA thing or a College thing or a Foundation thing?” Over the past few years of talking to all of you, I learned that we were not the only ones asking this question. When you build a house, over the years, you may add on a fantastic new sunroom, then an expansive extra bedroom, and then maybe you remodel …
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A compilation of 2022 and 2023 de novo urgent care center data shows a 7% decline in new locations: from 1,651 de novo centers in 2022 to 1,540 in 2023. A “de novo” center is a new urgent care location where services were not offered previously. The unit of measure is the physical site, meaning if an existing location already in operation happened to change ownership, such change is not counted as de novo growth. …
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Jeanne Marconi, MD Over the past 20 years, and more recently throughout the pandemic, suicide rates in the United States have generally been increasing; this has been especially true among adolescents and young adults.1 Despite improvements in recognition and appreciation of the impact of mental health issues, suicide rates continue to climb in America. Healthcare centers, whether inpatient or outpatient, have the unique opportunity to identify patients at-risk for self-harm and to intervene. These opportunities …
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Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Urgent Message: The uncertain and extended payment cycle for treating personal injuries caused by third parties, which may be subject to litigation or settlement, can be managed using tools such as letters of protection and medical liens. It’s not uncommon for an individual seriously injured in an accident or by medical negligence to bring a personal injury lawsuit against the at-fault party. If found liable, the at-fault party is held …
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Citation: Ayers A. Private Equity Ownership in Urgent Care By Number of Centers, 2024. J Urgent Care Med. 2024; 18(7):33-34 Although private equity started nibbling on urgent care as far back as 2007, its full investment push kicked off with the 2010 acquisitions and scaling of NextCare, MedExpress, and FastMed. Since that time, some regional platforms like Physicians Immediate Care, MD Now, and PhysicianOne have completed the entire private equity investment lifecycle of acquisition, scaling, and final …
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Heather Rothermel Consider this scenario: You’ve decided to open an urgent care center. You’ve secured funding, found the perfect location, hired amazing providers, created build-out plans to make it your own, and set a go-live date to open your doors to your community. Then you realize you haven’t started contracting and credentialing. In many markets, contracting and credentialing for a start-up can take 9 to 12 months or longer, and operators must consider this timeline …
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Members of the Urgent Care Association (UCA) get a lot of “free” stuff—resources, checklists, podcasts, job searches, magazines, webinars, templates, plans, and so on. But this year at the Urgent Care Convention we are going one better (two, actually). I’m talking about our new “Ask a Consultant” sessions and our Quality Programs Center, both of which essentially provide the space for free consulting (yes, free). The Ask a Consultant sessions feature top, vetted consultants who …
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Urgent Message: A supervising physician can be named in a lawsuit for malpractice against a nurse practitioner or physician assistant, however, there are steps supervising physicians can take to protect themselves against such actions. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc In urgent care settings, physicians are often responsible for supervising and overseeing a team of other healthcare employees, including nurse practitioners (NPs), physician assistants (PAs), and medical assistants (MAs). If any member of this team is …
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