Identifying the right contact person at a prospective client company begins with a sound, well-conceptualized, and up to date mailing list. Central to the list is the name of the individual responsible for the health and safety of the workforce. This information needs to be verified or updated regularly, something that could be accomplished by having a clerical staff member or high school student call every employer in your database each summer.
Read MoreA Short Course in Tort
John Shufeldt, MD, JD, MBA, FACEP I just completed teaching a semester of Health Law and Ethics at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. Over the next few months in this column, my goal is to distill te 40-hour course down to a few pages chock full of practical legal information. Lesson 1: Torts A tort is a civil wrong committed against a person or property interest for which the court …
Read MoreCoding for Observation, and More on Established vs. New Patients
Q. Is it possible for observation status codes (99217-99220) to be billed in an urgent care facility? A. Observation codes will require the point of service (POS) to be a hospital. If your urgent care is operated by a hospital and you can legitimately use a hospital POS, then you may be able to use these codes. If you use the physician office (POS-11) or urgent care (POS-20) place-of-service codes, then you could not use …
Read MoreEvaluating Your Clinic’s Competitive Strengths
Pull Up! Pull Up!
I am often asked what inspired my love of flying. Although this is the first time I have admitted it in public, I am proud to say that it all began with the movie Airplane! Dr. Rumack: You’d better tell the captain we’ve got to land as soon as we can. This woman has to be gotten to a hospital. Elaine Dickinson: A hospital? What is it? Dr. Rumack: It’s a big building with patients, …
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Putting Patients First: Redefining Quality in the Patient Experience
Urgent message: Patients are the ultimate judges of the quality of care you provide, and the opinions are likely to be swayed by factors that have little to do with your clinical expertise or skill. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Service industries – from retail stores to restaurants, hotels, and even banks – have embraced the customer’s point of view by meshing contemporary design, cutting-edge technology, and process engineering to develop services that are increasingly …
Read MoreDeveloping Data: May, 2009
In early 2008, UCA revamped its annual survey in conjunction with researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University with the goal of assuring that the UCA Benchmarking Committee’s efforts produced a scientifically valid report.Here we present some of the findings from this landmark survey, to which 436 urgent care centers responded.In this issue: What percentage of physicians working in urgent care are board certified – and how does that compare with primary care? The …
Read MoreEffective Occupational Health Sales Through Personality Profiling
A Rationale for Making Your Practice More Child-friendly
Safety First When Consummating Relationships with Vendors
JOHN SHUFELDT, MD, JD, MBA, FACEP One of my favorite Seinfeld exchanges is this prickly dialogue between George and his fiancée, Susan, regarding his disdain for (and challenge with) condoms: GEORGE: Oh, no, no … condoms are for single men. The day that we got engaged, I said goodbye to the condom forever. SUSAN: Just once … for the make-up sex. GEORGE: Make-up sex? You have to have that right after the fight, we’re way …
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