Practice Management
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 in a growing part of town is …
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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 J, Bobrowitz J, McEvoy A, Conrad D, …
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Download the article PDF: Urgent Care’s Top 100—by Number of Locations 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 …
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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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Download the article PDF: A 30-Year-Old Male with Chest and Leg Pain—and a History of Polysubstance Use 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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Download the article PDF: A 59-Year-Old with a Painful Finger Skin Lesion 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 …
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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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Download the article PDF: Six Tips to Bulletproof Your Chart: Lessons from the Exam Room and the Court Room Urgent message: In the event that you are taken to court over care that is alleged to have been insufficient, negligent, or otherwise poor, your own documentation at the time care is provided can be your saving grace or your undoing. William Sullivan, DO, JD INTRODUCTION Providing proper medical care in urgent care centers is only …
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Urgent message: Headache is most often a benign complaint among patients presenting to urgent care. Vigilance for risk factors and appropriate use of validated screening criteria are essential to uncovering potentially life-threatening etiologies. Paul Hansen, MD Citation: Hansen P. More than a simple headache: using the SNNO-OP10 criteria to screen for life-threatening headache presentations. J Urgent Care Med. 2023;17(9):18-21 ABSTRACT Introduction: Headache is most commonly a benign complaint among urgent care patients. Chronic subdural hematomas, …
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