Practice Management
Click Here to download the article PDF Urgent message: Food, drug, and mass retailers continue to explore the healthcare space and seek profitable ways to leverage their massive footprints. As they shift their strategies in favor of primary care, especially for Medicare populations, they are relinquishing control of the transactional health market to urgent care. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc is President of Experity Consulting and is Senior Editor of The Journal of Urgent Care …
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It’s a weird time right now, isn’t it? On one hand, visit volumes seem to be back to our pre-COVID “norms.” This should be business-as-usual to us, but it feels scary because everyone got used to volumes being so high for so long. On the other hand, everyone is short-staffed, so it’s a good thing we aren’t busier, but being short-staffed is also scary because we feel unprepared for the coming months when volumes go …
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Click Here to download the article PDF Urgent message: When considering growth in urgent care, there are both advantages and challenges to acquiring an existing urgent care center vs developing a completely new business. Heather Real The urgent care industry is ever-evolving and flexing to meet the needs of patients and communities. This means the way operators enter the industry needs to be flexible, too. While starting a new business in a freshly outfitted space …
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Click Here to download the article PDF Urgent message: Urinary tract infection is a common diagnosis in pediatric urgent care. As such, efforts must be made to ensure antibiotics are prescribed only when necessary and to decrease the rate of unnecessary prescribing. Benjamin Klick, MD; Tammy Speerhas, DNP, FNP-C; Jessica Parrott, DNP, CPNP-PC, CNE; Jeffrey Bobrowitz, MD; Anne McEvoy, MD; Debra Conrad, MD, Jade Eves, PA-C; Theresa Guins, MD Citation: Klick B, Speerhas T, Parrott …
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Click Here to download the article PDF If urgent care had a family tree, it would show an ancestry rich in physicians with a pioneer spirit—individuals who wanted to find a way of practicing medicine that they believed to be more sensible, efficient, and economical while still offering excellent clinical care. Based on the decades that followed, up through today and beyond it’s safe to say the “experiment” has been an unqualified success.This is not …
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David Gahtan MS, PA-C and Joshua Russell, MD, MSc, FCUCM, FACEP Whether we like it or not, electronic medical records are here to stay. And their takeover has been swift. Over recent decades, the EMR has gone from an obscure, bare-bones, often clunky digital notepad to a ubiquitous and powerful tool which tracks enormous amounts of patient data. To continue to practice medicine, we’ve had no choice but to go along for the ride. It’s …
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Click Here to download the PDF A 30-year-old male with history of polysubstance use presents after a motor vehicle collision. He reports chest and leg pain, and denies nausea, vomiting, or shortness of breath. He has no known cardiac history. View the ECG taken and consider what your diagnosis and next steps would be. Resolution of the case is described on the next page.
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Click Here to download the article PDF A 59-year-old woman presents with a painful skin lesion near her fingernail which has developed over the past week. She reports a history of advanced non-small cell lung cancer, for which she was recently started on erlotinib. On examination you observe a glistening, hemorrhagic papule at the lateral nail fold with surrounding erythema and edema. The patient denies trauma or exposure to skin irritants. View the image taken …
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Click Here to download the article PDF A 41-year-old male presents with knee pain after playing basketball in his driveway with his teenage son. He reports that he had sudden pain and heard a “pop” as he landed after jumping. He is unable to fully extend his leg. View the image taken and consider what your diagnosis and next steps would be. Resolution of the case is described on the following page.
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One of the key “selling” points of urgent care has always been that if patients who don’t have limb- or life-threatening concerns are able to get acute care someplace other than the emergency room, they would go there, thereby lowering cost, wait times, and risk associated with the ED. Now there’s evidence to support the first part of this premise, thanks to a new report from Mesirow Investment Banking. As seen in the graph below, …
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