Practice Management
A 12-year-old boy is brought to your urgent care center by his mother. She reports that while playing dodgeball after school, he felt a “pop” in his groin, followed immediately by pain. Having seen him walk across the exam room, it’s clear the effort causes discomfort. View the images taken and consider what your diagnosis and next steps would be.
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As the urgent care industry continues to grow, competition for the staff that will propel your business to new heights gets fiercer. You need to stand out to the candidates you want, just as they have to impress you. And once you hire them, you have to hang on to them; around one-third of employees quit within the first 6 months of employment. This is untrodden territory for many urgent care operators. How exactly do …
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Ownership structure gets talked about a lot in urgent care circles. Where entrepreneurial physicians essentially created the industry, it wasn’t too long before venture capitalists and health systems wanted in on the action and started gobbling up existing operators. Today those entities dominate. That doesn’t mean there are no other paths to success in the industry, however. The Franchise Times just announced that American Family Care cracked their list of the 200 fastest-growing franchises, coming …
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Patient satisfaction scores have become something of a currency in the healthcare marketplace. That’s probably truest in urgent care, where patients are making snap decisions on where to go in the next 5 minutes—often guided by Yelp, Google, and even travel sites like Travelocity. It’s so common that fear of bad reviews can creep into your mind and start affecting how you practice. The mainstream media is picking up on that concern, though the coverage …
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A provider’s time is tight in urgent care. Margins can be, too. But time you put aside to give away your services in measured quantities can wind up paying great dividends down the road. Xpress Wellness Urgent Care is investing in that concept by offering free sports physicals for student athletes in the Duncan, OK area this fall. Anyone taking them up on the offer even gets to go online to pick a time that’s …
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You probably learned how to administer CPR before you even entered med school. It’s not exactly a complex medical procedure, after all. It’s so simple, in fact, that very little clinical research has gone into assessing whether there’s a better, more effective way to do it—until now. The National Institutes of Health Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium tested various combinations of chest compression frequency and chest compression depth to assess the optimal method. The research took into …
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Around 90% of men who have sex with men say they’re aware of the availability and purpose of preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP) against HIV transmission—and usage among that population rose five-fold (from 6% to 35%) between 2014 and 2017, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nonetheless, overall usage in terms of numbers remains relatively low, due in part to the reluctance of some healthcare providers to offer the necessary patient …
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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 message: While hospital emergency departments view the tactic of advertising their “wait times” to the community as a strategic marketing advantage, the skewed perceptions it creates can mislead patients and even put patients’ health at risk. Among the many factors leading to the rise of urgent care has been …
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A North Carolina hospital system is installing metal detectors, limiting elevator access in specific areas within its facility, and hiring armed guards to keep watch in its emergency rooms in the wake of incidents ranging from an armed patient roaming the halls to a distraught mother barricading herself and her son (a patient) in a hospital room. While it’s laudable that they’re doing what they feel is necessary to keep patients and staff safe, such …
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends all Americans who are eligible for a flu shot (meaning anyone over the age of 6 months, for the most part) get one before the end of this month. That’s too late to prevent a serious outbreak in Baton Rouge, LA, though, where a school saw 38% of its upper-grade students body stricken with flu-like symptoms. While not all cases were confirmed to be influenza infection, the …
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