Practice Management
Here’s the scenario: Your clinic opens at 8. A nonclinical staff member arrives at 7:50, only to find a woman in distress waiting at the locked front door, complaining of chest pains and shortness of breath and heading toward a full-blown panic. You hope your staffer would: Let the patient in immediately, then call the first clinician scheduled to work to see how close they are to arriving Let the patient in immediately and call …
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The increased wait times in emergency rooms and explosion in the popularity of urgent care have been (and continue to be) well documented. Not as much attention has been paid to why there’s so much more traffic. A study soon to be published in Academic Emergency Medicine reveals a few of the answers—and some of them support the notion that urgent care fulfills unique needs, either clinically or in terms of patient preference: Limited access …
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Growing investment by service providers, occupational medicine companies, and entrepreneurs, along with wider acceptance by health plans, seems to confirm that telemedicine is no longer the Next Big Thing, but a newly essential service that urgent care operators need to consider offering. Most recently, U.S. HealthWorks announced that it’s launching a comprehensive telemedicine program called USHW CareConnectNOW, which will link patients to state-licensed medical providers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So far, …
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New guidelines for caring for young athletes with concussions favor movement over rest more than previous recommendations. The advisory, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, suggests that getting the patient to start moving—slowly, with gradual increases—may shorten recovery time. The authors are very clear that this does not mean returning to the field of play right away, however. Rather, where patients have been instructed to rest until symptoms completely disappear previously, there now …
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The ever-increasing investment hospitals are making in their own urgent care offerings, along with the growing senior population and evolving habits of younger patients, are key factors in the ongoing growth of the urgent care industry, according to a new report by TMR Research. Urgent Care Centers Market—Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Trends, Analysis, Growth, and Forecast 2017–2025 also credits the pioneering operators who brought the industry to this point, however, noting that the services …
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As we’ve told you previously, visionary urgent care operators are finding golden opportunities in empty spaces that in years past would not have been considered prime locations for healthcare facilities (banks, restaurants…). Now it looks like there could be similar opportunity in retail space being vacated in larger shopping centers and malls. An article in Business Insider suggests that big retail spaces, already finding it harder to fill vacancies with traditional shopping outlets, will have …
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While it may take patients a little time to get used to the idea, prepayment and credit card holds are becoming more and common among urgent care operators who are tired of chasing down payment from patients who’ve already received care—or having to write off charges altogether. Revenue cycle management leaders like Practice Velocity actively promote the concept to their partners. As with anything new (especially anything new involving money), some patients object to the …
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There aren’t many things more truly urgent than a child considering suicide. More adolescents kill themselves than die from cancer, heart disease, and many other causes combined, in fact. Now researchers at the University of Missouri‒Kansas City School of Medicine say a brief screening tool designed to detect suicidal risk was shown to be effective in a pediatric urgent care clinic. Considering previous studies showing that 17% of high school students had seriously considered suicide—and …
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Different markets have different standards of living—and compensation. So, it’s important to get a sense early on whether what you’re willing to pay aligns well with qualified job seekers. That’s going to be a lot tougher if an emerging trend continues to grow, however. Some cities and states are forbidding interviewers from asking candidates about their current, or most recent, salary. Legislation to that effect was just passed in Philadelphia, though the city will delay …
Read MoreThere’s little evidence that emerging payment models (eg, concierge medicine, cash-only practices, and accountable care organizations [ACOs]) are gaining any serious traction in urgent care—but that doesn’t mean they’re not making headway elsewhere. ACOs, in particular, are growing in usage among physicians, according to the Medscape Physician Compensation Report 2017. Usage of cash-only and concierge models is also growing, albeit much more modestly, as the graph below shows. Data source: Medscape Physician Compensation Report 2017. …
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