Practice Management
No sooner do we close the books on one of the worst flu seasons in recent history than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells us to expect a high volume of tick-, mosquito-, and flea-borne infections as the weather warms up. It’s not just greater numbers of the same diagnoses, either; new tickborne diseases like Heartland virus are showing up in the continental U.S. Tickborne diseases are climbing most in the Northeast, Upper …
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With patients having more choices of healthcare providers—and settings—than ever before, understanding what drives them to a given location can mean the difference between success and going out of business. In fact, one out of five patient participants in Vitals’ ninth annual Physician Wait Time Report say they’ve switched physicians specifically because of long wait times. Even more (30%) have walked out on an appointment because they were made to wait too long. The cost …
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CityMD will pay a $6.6 million settlement over a variety of charges related to treating Medicare patients at its 96 urgent care centers. The U.S. Department of Justice claims the company billed Medicare for services by physicians who did not actually provide them, and charged for more complex procedures than were actually performed or that were unsupported by the documentation provided. By doing so, CityMD received higher reimbursements than it would have if it billed …
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Urgent message: While the launch of handheld technologies, email, messaging, and social media brought an immediate increase in productivity through the ability to access information instantly, over time these modern wonders have proven to become a distraction in the workplace. 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. Whether it’s email, social media, or internet searches, the modern workplace …
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A Detroit-area physician is among the clinicians indicted in an alleged scheme to overprescribe numerous commonly abused drugs. Asm Akter Ahmed, MD has already been stripped of his license to practice medicine based on charges that he wrote prescriptions destined for four co-conspiring pharmacists, who then fraudulently billed Medicare, Medicaid, and Blue Cross Blue Shield for the medications—some of which were never even dispensed. The estimated cost of the operation, which ran from 2011 through …
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To the average consumer, the key similarity between the urgent care center and the emergency room is plain to see: you get to see a doctor without an appointment. That’s deceptively simple, however, and doesn’t take into account relative wait times, cost to the patient and the insurer, whether the complaint is truly emergent, and the overall implications of going to the ED when it’s not necessary. FastMed Urgent Care, which owns and operates 109 …
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JUCM, The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine won a Silver Award in the American Society of Healthcare Publication Editor’s (ASHPE) 2018 Awards Competition, takings its place among winners from much larger publications such as The Journal of Family Practice, the American Journal of Critical Care, and the American Journal of Nursing. JUCM was honored in the Case Report category for an original article published in our September 2017 issue and authored by Ralph Mohty, MS4 …
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The business of urgent care may be taking care of patients, but that business won’t last long without sound financial practices. Understanding that the money coming in has to be more than the money going out doesn’t take a whole lot of acumen; truly grasping how to maximize the process for the current health and future growth of the business is another thing, however. The Urgent Care Association has invited speaker Dan Phillips to share …
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Chronic pain patients who completed a comprehensive, multidisciplinary pain rehabilitation program used significantly fewer healthcare resources in a study presented at the American Academy of Pain Medicine’s 2018 annual meeting. The only exception was in behavioral health, in which access increased. Over the course of the 3-week program, patients with chronic (≥3 months) noncancer pain were able to access physical, occupational, and medical therapies and taper the doses of opioids prescribed to them. Researchers analyzed …
Read MoreMedicare reimbursements to many freestanding emergency rooms will be cut significantly if a new recommendation by the Medicare Payment Advisory Committee (MedPAC) is implemented. MedPAC voted unanimously to reduce reimbursements to off-campus, 24-hour hospital EDs located in urban areas within 6 miles of an on-campus ED by 30%. According to an Erdman analysis of the proposal, freestanding, off-campus EDs typically have lower operating costs than on-campus EDs but receive the same Medicare payments—giving them higher …
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