Practice Management
Local media in the Ravenna, OH area was atwitter with news of an active shooter outside a VA medical center recently. The drama began when an employee arrived for work and noticed a man with a sawed-off shotgun kneeling and kissing a flagpole in front of the building. When the facility’s security officer was informed and went out to investigate, the kneeling man fired off a shot into the air, triggering calls to 911, a …
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As JUCM News readers may recall, use of telemedicine services has increased dramatically—and fallen precipitously—at various times during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some urgent care operators have tried to ride the wave, while others have continued to act (or not act) based on their skepticism of the medium’s viability in the urgent care setting. Now it appears that the investment community may be weighing in with its collective opinion on the future of …
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Healthcare professionals in general—with urgent care providers prominent among them—are prone to burn out due to the never-ending responsibility for their patients’ health while also having to keep up with the demands of coding, compliance, updates in practice standards imposed by the state and employers…. And certainly things have not been made better by the COVID-19 pandemic. Just how bad things have deteriorated was made evident in a report issued by Augmedix. Taking a review-article …
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The COVID-19 pandemic threw the entire world into chaos. Certainly urgent care centers experienced their own massive disruptions, such as keeping up with seemingly spontaneous changes in rules related to caring for patients during a healthcare crisis. That doesn’t mean less attention can be paid to complying with relevant regulations, however, as an urgent care operator in New York can affirm. The company agreed to pay over half a million dollars to settle allegations that …
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A pair of recently announced mergers may signal the advent of new trends in the urgent care marketplace. First, the joining of Xpress Wellness and Integrity Urgent Care, which puts 47 urgent care centers in rural Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas under a single corporate umbrella, reflects surging interest in providing services to residents outside of urban and suburban areas. At the same time, HCA is buying BetterMed and its 12 locations in central Virginia—further confirmation …
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The effectiveness and value of vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 continue to be confirmed with the publication of each new related study. Even detractors have to acknowledge that reductions in hospitalizations and deaths in the face of new variants speak to the capability of the vaccines to keep people both out of the hospital and alive even if they do get COVID-19. The latest such study published by The Journal of the American Medical Association reveals …
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Rates of new infections with SARS-CoV-2 were so consistently low after the post-holiday surge, per the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions COVID tracker, that many public health officials at the federal and state levels started to wonder if we could declare the pandemic “over.” Such conjecture now seems to have been premature as positive tests are again climbing (albeit relatively slowly), possibly thanks to new Omicron variants BA.4 and BA.5. As first reported by …
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New data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention add to previously published reports indicating that the spread of gonorrhea, syphilis, and congenital syphilis actually increased in the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only that, but the jump seen in 2020 continued into the first part of 2021 compared with previous years. Gonorrhea cases grew by 10% between 2019 and 2020, while primary and secondary syphilis cases were up 7%. Worse, …
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Some patients have been scared off getting COVID-19 vaccine booster shots because they experienced a few days of malaise, chills, and overall ill feelings after getting the first shot. For many, especially older patients, those worries are unfounded according to an article just published by JAMA Network Open. A study of individuals between 60 and 79 years of age in Israel revealed that a second booster shot (ie, a third dose overall) resulted in at …
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As JUCM News has reported recently, the dynamics of the federal test-to-treat program designed to ensure efficiency in helping patients newly diagnosed with COVID-19 have proved difficult to decipher. Though as first described it seemed to leave urgent care out of the running to participate, the Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) clarified that urgent care centers who meet the relevant criteria may qualify to participate after …
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