Practice Management
No-see opiate prescriptions have cost an urgent care physician in Burlington County, NJ his medical license—which he willfully surrendered in order to avoid paying penalties and fees totaling over $127,000. The state had already suspended his license temporarily after accusing him of prescribing narcotic pain medications to patients he didn’t examine over a 5-year period. If he violates the consent order he agreed to, he will have to pay the money immediately and face additional …
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Figure 1. The patient is a 41-year-old woman who presents with wrist pain and swelling after falling on her outstretched hand in ulnar deviation. She says she stumbled stepping into the house while carrying groceries. View the image taken and consider your next steps, along with possible diagnoses.
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Milwaukee-based Aurora Health Care may soon start offering a new digital concierge that allows patients to enter their symptoms on a computer or mobile device and receive real-time advice on what the most appropriate care site might be. The chatbot, called Bouy, appears in a web browser, understands “natural language,” and adapts to the user’s answers. It operates, essentially, like an electronic decision tree by asking the user a series of questions aimed at directing …
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It may be premature to call it a trend, but stories of urgent care operators taking their services directly to patients continue to pop up around the country. It’s becoming a more appealing prospect to payers, too. Most recently, Mercy Care Plan granted its members access to DispatchHealth in the Phoeniz, AZ metropolitan area. The service allows patients who may be too ill or frail to travel to the emergency room or an urgent care …
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Updates to pain guidelines in the era of opioid addiction have focused on treatment of chronic pain, generally. The latest edict takes a close look at the practice of prescribing narcotic medications for acute pain, however—a subject all the more relevant to the urgent care provider. Improving the Safety of Opioid Use for Acute Noncancer Pain in Hospitalized Adults: A Consensus Statement from the Society of Hospital Medicine recommends limiting the use of opioids to …
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Facebook is in hot water in the wake of revelations that Cambridge Analytica gained access to user data inappropriately. Now the social media pioneer admits that, at the same time, it was on the hunt for healthcare data on its own users, having asked hospitals to share information on illness and prescriptions for unnamed patients. Paradoxically, the company says it sought the information in order to help “major U.S. hospitals” identify patients who may need …
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It may come as no surprise to healthcare industry veterans, but there are fresh data that shed new light on greater utilization of emergency rooms by pediatric patients in neighborhoods viewed as disadvantaged. Statistically, kids who live in “low opportunity” areas are roughly 33% more likely to visit an urgent care center or the ED than children who grow up elsewhere. It’s not just scratchy throats and sudden fevers sending them there, either; the less-advantaged …
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Regular readers of JUCM News know mergers between large corporations in previously disparate markets (eg, insurance and provision of healthcare) have been coming fast and furious. Simultaneously, fewer newly minted physicians are choosing primary care as their practice of choice as on-demand healthcare continues to grow. None of these trends occurs in a vacuum, of course—in fact, it’s likely that there are directly links among them, as pointed out in an article just published in …
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Urgent message: Most of the laboratory testing that occurs in urgent care consists of simple, on-site tests that are “waived” from federal CLIA regulations—but urgent care centers must still comply with standards affecting their CLIA waiver. All facilities in the United States that perform laboratory testing on human specimens for health assessment or the diagnosis, prevention, or treatment of disease are regulated under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988 (CLIA). CLIA requires laboratories to …
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Key metrics—also known as key performance indicators (KPIs)—are driving your business, whether you know it or not. And if you do know it, you’ll be able to capitalize on them to ensure continued growth and prosperity in your urgent care operations. If you don’t…well, you’ll be left just hoping for the best. Whichever camp you fall into, you can gain new insights into measuring and capitalizing on KPIs in a webinar to be hosted by …
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