Practice Management
To the average consumer, the key similarity between the urgent care center and the emergency room is plain to see: you get to see a doctor without an appointment. That’s deceptively simple, however, and doesn’t take into account relative wait times, cost to the patient and the insurer, whether the complaint is truly emergent, and the overall implications of going to the ED when it’s not necessary. FastMed Urgent Care, which owns and operates 109 …
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The ongoing growth of urgent care, among other trends, is at least partially responsible for an increasing scarcity of traditional primary care physicians, according to analysis of new data posted to Advisory Board. Citing research by the Health Care Cost Institute and an article just published in The New York Times, the piece notes that “the emergence of urgent care centers and retail clinics, as well as proliferating mergers between healthcare providers” is lowering patients’ …
Read MoreWe all know urgent care has been growing steadily, nearly since its inception. Hard data on the size of the marketplace can be hard to come by, though, as different sources apply varying definitions of what exactly constitutes an urgent care center. Similarly, we know proper utilization of urgent care services has tremendous potential to lower healthcare costs compared with visits to the emergency room. Again, though, the details can be hard to put a …
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An urgent care nurse practitioner at NextCare in Albuquerque, NM has just been named to the Board of Nurses of the American Health Council. Gilberto Alvarado, MSN, CNP, FNP-BC, BSN, RN has been in healthcare for 45 years, starting as a hospital corpsman in the United States Navy and advancing through a number of clinical positions—with the requisite additional training—culminating in his current position at NextCare. AHC describes its mission through the mnemonic ABCDE: advocacy, …
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An urgent care operator in Ohio is one of the 14 sites in a phase 3 clinical trial for a prospective Allergan product to treat patients with diabetic gastroparesis (DG), a condition that slows or stops the movement of food from the stomach to the small intestine. The trial, officially titled A 46-week, Double-blind, Placebo-controlled, Phase 3 Study With a 6-week Randomized-withdrawal Period to Evaluate the Safety and Efficacy of Relamorelin in Patients with Diabetic …
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When Anthem announced some months ago it would not cover bills for “unnecessary” (in their retrospective view) trips to the emergency room in some states, we noted objections from physician groups. Now that the policy is in place and claims for 2018 have started to be filed, we’re seeing media reports on angry patients who are getting stuck with bills they presumed would be covered. Consumer Reports, for one, recounts the case of a patient …
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A newly published report from the Urgent Care Association reveals just how far the industry has come from its “doc in a box” days, to the point that it’s now a key element of the healthcare continuum. In fact, urgent care centers account for 18.2% of all primary care visits and 9.7% of outpatients visits overall in the U.S. The Essential Role of the Urgent Care Center in Population Health also offers new data indicating …
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In September, we told you about an urgent care center in North Carolina that had committed to serving the immediate needs of patients with psychiatric and behavioral health concerns—but was struggling to attract enough patients. The staff was seeing fewer than 17 patients a week then; today, it’s closer to 50, halfway to their goal of serving 100 each week. Carolina Outreach just conducted an open house to celebrate its 6-month anniversary and to continue …
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An unknown man and woman delivered a second man with two gunshot wounds to an urgent care center in Kitsap County, WA last Friday—and then sped away, leaving law enforcement to wonder if they were simply good Samaritans, witnesses, or somehow involved in the shooting. The victim was treated in the urgent care center and then taken to a nearby hospital with non–life-threatening injuries. It remains to be seen how involved the urgent care center’s …
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Urgent message: As a retail delivery channel for healthcare, success in urgent care depends on successfully executing the “retail” elements of the urgent care delivery model—the first of which is “location.” Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc is Chief Executive Officer of Velocity Urgent Care and is Practice Management Editor of The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine. Urgent care differs from other types of medicine in that it adheres to a retail delivery model; successful urgent …
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