Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

The Front Office: Window to Your Practice

Urgent message: Patients will return again and again—and tell their friends, too—if your center’s manager and employees are unfailingly courteous, com petent, and thorough. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc, Experity If you’re planning to own and operate an urgent care center, you’re probably not thinking about managing an administrative office. Instead, you envision yourself hurrying between exam rooms, suturing cuts, setting fractures, and dispensing orders. Digging your way out of paperwork, refereeing staff disputes, tracking …

Developing Data: October, 2008

In Developing Data, JUCM will offer results not only from UCA’s annual benchmarking surveys, but also from research conducted elsewhere to present an expansive view of the healthcare marketplace in which urgent care seeks to strengthen its presence. In this issue: How did patients in a national study of visits to emergency departments in the United States rate their experience according to select key indicators of satisfaction? One can surmise from the data that participants …

Nebulizer Treatment Coding and Take-backs on 99051

DAVID STERN, MD (Practice Velocity) Q.Payors do not seem to want to pay on the code E0572 (aerosol compressor, adjustable pressure, light duty for intermittent use). What can we do to get payment? A.This code is not for simple use of the aerosol compressor, but is actually used to code for sale of the actual nebulizer machine. Thus, this code would rarely be appropriate for use in the urgent care setting. Q.How do we get …

Occupational Health Sales and Marketing as a Team Sport

A thinly veiled secret in most urgent care clinics is the marginal role that sales and marketing plays in the mores of these organizations. Indeed, healthcare sales professionals tend to be like your Uncle Fred: it’s always nice to see him, but he’s not really woven into the inner fabric of your family. Why? To a large extent, urgent care owners have a hard time merging the healthcare side of their clinic(s) with the business …

Medical Search Firms: Match Making Comes to Medicine

JOHN SHUFELDT, MD, JD, MBA, FACEP Recently, a friend called to tell me he was going to the airport to meet a woman he met online. He described her as tall, blonde, athletic and, based upon her e-mails and witty repartee, very smart. He brought the photo she e-mailed so he would recognize her when she walked through the gate. Oddly, he never did see her walk off the plane; however, he felt a tug …

Keeping Workers Well and Your Practice Profitable

Urgent message: Adding a corporate wellness component to a UCOM initiative fosters better relationships with clients and good care for their employees—as well as more business for the practice. Donna Lee Gardner, RN, MS, MBA Corporate wellness is one of the five basic service lines an urgent care occupational medicine (UCOM) clinic is advised to offer in order to position itself as a truly comprehensive resource for employers and their employees. Other primary occupational medicine …

Managing Wait Times for Greater Customer Satisfaction

Urgent message: Though patient waits are often unavoidable, understanding and addressing the causes can help mitigate negative impact on the patient and the practice. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc, Experity The term “urgent care” conveys immediate medical attention, so it’s no surprise that the greatest determinant of customer satisfaction for an urgent care center is how quickly patients are treated and released. But how does a busy walk-in clinic which must be prepared to handle …

Bankruptcy Part Two: Honesty is the Only Policy

JOHN SHUFELDT, MD, JD, MBA, FACEP In this challenging financial market, in this space (urgent care medicine), should bankruptcy be something with which you are overly concerned? The answer is an unequivocal, “yes!” Urgent care ownership is not for the faint of heart or the short of capital. As a friend of mine said, “This business has a lot of moving parts and misfiring on any one of them can cause your business to be …

Developing Data: September, 2008

As an emerging distinct practice environment, urgent care is in the early stages of building a data set specific to its norms and practices. In Developing Data, JUCM will offer results not only from UCA’s annual benchmarking surveys, but also from research conducted elsewhere to present an expansive view of the healthcare marketplace in which urgent care seeks to strengthen its presence. In this issue: What effect does the presence of a retail clinic have …

Of Discounts, Surgical Wound Dressing, and the S9088 Code

DAVID STERN, MD (Practice Velocity) Q.For uninsured patients, how much discount should be given—70% off charges? Particularly in California. A.It would be extremely rare to offer such a big discount to self-pay patients. It would be unadvisable for the following reasons: Unless your fee schedule is ridiculously high, you could not operate profitably at these Discounts should be given not for being self-pay, specif- ically, but for paying in full at time of You will …