Practice Management
As a key moment in the Urgent Care Association (UCA) Convention in Las Vegas last week, members elected a new board, led by Board President Scott Prysi, MD. The full list of board members is available on the UCA website. Additionally, the College of Urgent Care Medicine (CUCM) elected its new board members: Lindsey Fish, MD (also JUCM images editor); Roger Hicks, MD, FCUCM; Joshua Russell, MD, MSc, FACEP, FCUCM (also JUCM editor in chief); …
Read More
With thew news of the expected retirement of Chief Executive Officer Lou Ellen Horwitz, the Urgent Care Association (UCA) has announced the search for its next executive leader. In 2020, Horwitz transitioned away from the UCA board of directors and out of semi-retirement to return to the UCA’s top leadership role. She previously served as the association’s executive director from 2006 to 2012. Throw your hat in the ring: No doubt the succession plans will …
Read More
Do you remember what it was like in the summer of 2020? If that summer had a theme, it would have been “overlooked.” Everyone was jumping up and down and waving their arms to get the attention of suppliers, government agencies, payers, diagnostic companies, and pharmaceutical companies so we could meet the needs of the patients literally lining up in front of our centers. We had to fight for every single thing we got, and …
Read More
I’m assuming you saw news stories last month with headlines like this: “Walmart and Other Drug Stores Want to Help You Skip Trips to the Doctor.” Walmart Health is set to open 28 new locations in the coming year. Consumers can get testing and treatment for strep, flu, and COVID-19 at a Walmart pharmacy in 12 states, at Walgreens in 13 states, and at CVS in 10 states. Rite Aid is working on it, too. …
Read More
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 …
Read More
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been following the progress of a tax bill that would have imposed an 8.75% tax on urgent care charges in Massachusetts. Thanks at least in part to strong lobbying against the bill by the Urgent Care Association and the North East Regional Urgent Care Association (NERUCA), among other concerned parties, the bill was stalled as the legislature’s 2018 General Session came to a close. If the bill had gone …
Read More
The Urgent Care Association, long a proponent of sound antibiotic stewardship as a safeguard against drug-resistant bacteria, is working with the George Washington University Antibiotic Resistance Center on an initiative to improve antibiotic prescribing practices. One key element, through the College of Urgent Care Medicine, is an antibiotic stewardship toolkit based on the Core Elements of Outpatient Antibiotic Stewardship developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. UCA also just took part in—and sponsored—a …
Read More
Among the proposed changes in the newly released 2019 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) is a new urgent care specialty measure set. The Urgent Care Association and the College of Urgent Care Medicine had asked the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to include 12 specific measures, 11 of which were included in CMS’s proposal. The creation of a proper set is expected to help urgent care providers select measures when fulfilling the quality component …
Read More
Physician burnout is at least as dangerous as unsafe workplace conditions when it comes to medical errors, according to a new study published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings. In fact, it indicates that physicians with burnout are more than twice as likely to self-report a medical error compared with those without burnout. The potential consequences of that are dramatic; existing data show that med errors are a factor in as many as 200,000 deaths annually in …
Read More
The Urgent Care Association (UCA) and the North East Regional Urgent Care Association (NERUCA) have stepped up their joint efforts to lobby against proposed legislation in Massachusetts that it says would wreak havoc not only on urgent care operators, but the entire state healthcare system. No longer content to simply urge interested parties to contact their legislators to make their feelings about the legislation known, both groups have gone a step further by staging a …
Read More