Practice Management
New data published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine definitively show that retail clinics located near hospitals do nothing to reduce the number of visits to the emergency room. Proponents of drugstore, grocery, and “big box store” clinics have suggested in the past that offering walk-in care in a retail setting would keep patients with low-acuity complaints out of the ED, but apparently many patients don’t see it that way. The Annals report focused on …
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Urgent care operators who have adopted digital radiography (DR) will tell you it’s cheaper to maintain, less cumbersome to operate, and overall just more efficient to use than old-school analog x-ray systems. Now you can add Medicare to DR’s proponents—and they’re putting your money where their mouth is. Come 2017, Medicare will start reducing payments for exams performed on analog x-ray systems by 20%. Starting in 2018, urgent care centers using computed radiography (CR) will …
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Urgent message: Urgent care plays a vital role in reducing medical expenses and improving population health by enabling the right care, at the right place, by the right provider, at the right price. Introduction Health-care reform, quality of care, and costs are center stage topics for politicians and the general public. As medical providers and administrators in the United States, we share in the challenge of understanding this complex system. Whereas traditional approaches in the …
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Urgent care watchers know the industry has been growing at a steady clip for years, with the latest surge fueled by patients and payers eager to get quality care for a fraction of the price of a trip to the emergency room. Some urgent care operators focus more on growth than others, of course. Health Data Management and Merchant Medicine teamed up to identify just which 30 urgent care chains have grown to be the …
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A new survey of hospital construction projects points to the ongoing growth of urgent care as one driver of a construction boom within the healthcare industry. In fact, urgent care, outpatient facilities, and medical specialty complexes are the key contributors to significant increases in new construction. Health Facilities Management’s 2016 Hospital Construction Survey indicated the boom is on track to continue, too; 35% of respondents said they expect to have a medical office project in …
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The Urgent Care Association (UCA) sent a letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in favor of lowering the copay patients would be responsible for when visiting an urgent care visit, effective in 2018. The changes would affect the cost-sharing structure for “standardized options” (ie, Simple Choice plans) that plan issuers offer in the individual insurance marketplace. Standardized options are intended to simplify the consumer plan selection process; each has a single …
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URGENT MESSAGE: Increased awareness of concussion risks in organized sports creates an opportunity for urgent care centers to offer concussion education and treatment for student-athletes. James Nawalaniec is a first-year medical student at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. Concussions can be difficult to diagnose and easy to ignore, although they pose a very serious threat to brain health and function—especially if more than one concussion is sustained within a short period …
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LCMC Health, a nonprofit healthcare system that operates hospitals in the New Orleans area, says it’s going to create a network of seven urgent care clinics in the same area starting next spring. Over the course of 18 months, LCMC plans to buy an undetermined number of existing locations and build the rest in new locations. LCMC is working with Baton Rouge-based Premier Health on this project. Premier Health owns 40 urgent care clinics, many …
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A new survey seems to indicate that it may take a long time—or more resources than you might think—for patients to understand their options for virtual care. Two large health systems rolled out their plans to offer virtual care in Iowa more than a year ago, but most residents still don’t get it. That’s bad news for the plans, but it also means the intended goal of offering virtual care in the first place—namely, slowing …
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Urgent message: Various methods have been suggested for screening for type 2 diabetes mellitus in the asymptomatic population, although more consensus about the best approach, especially in settings outside primary care, is required. The usefulness of a diabetes-screening pathway for the early detection of undiagnosed diabetes was assessed in a quality-improvement study of a convenience sample from an urgent care center. How this article/column helps you: by analyzing findings on how screening all adults for …
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