Practice Management
The West Virginia House of Delegates has approved a bill that would give advanced practice registered nurses more authority to treat patients and prescribe medications without a physician’s supervision. If the state senate also passes the “Nurse Practitioners Bill,” West Virginia will become the 22nd state allowing nurse practitioners to do so. The senate has already proposed two amendments to the version passed by the house; one would establish an advisory board to put forth …
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Identifying and providing care for an underserved population may hold untold benefits for urgent care operators. In the case of Cliníca Médicos in Chattanooga, TN, that meant focusing on Spanish-speaking residents. Now the clinic is about to double in size just one year after opening its doors. The original mission was to offer healthcare services to area Latinos, regardless of insurance status. Patient volume has risen every month since, to the point that the clinic now …
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One of the retail health sector’s key selling points—convenience—may partially negate its perceived cost benefit vs urgent care or the emergency room. A new study published in Health Affairs reveals that use of retail clinics actually led to higher overall spending because patients were more inclined to seek professional care for complaints so minor that they could have been treated at home. The data, which reflect claims data from Aetna, indicate that 58% of retail …
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Some healthcare facilities may view urgent care as the competition, but there’s mutual benefit to establishing complementary relationships among local providers and settings, not to mention patients and employers. That’s the message Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Practice Velocity will impart in a one-hour webinar to be hosted by the Urgent Care Association (UCA) on Thursday, March 24, at 1 p.m., Central time. An active referral network benefits not only both healthcare facilities, but patients …
Read MoreU.S. HealthWorks is on a Rocky Mountain high after buying Colorado-based Arbor Occupational Medicine. Bringing Arbor’s four locations into the fold means U.S. Healthworks will now have 231 locations in 21 states; these are the first in Colorado, however. Arbor was founded in Boulder in 1992 with a focus on occupational medicine and physical therapy and a mission to reduce return-to-work time. All told, U.S. HealthWorks collectively has roughly 800 providers who administer care for …
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The denial rate for claims initiated after the crossover from the ICD-9 system to ICD-10 codes in October has been steady—and lower than hysterics predicted it would be—if the 262 million claims processed by one company are any indication. RelayHealth Financial, a revenue cycle management provider, found a denial rate of 1.6% in each month from November 2015 through the first 3 weeks of February 2016. That reflects claims involving 630,000 healthcare providers. The financial …
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Data from the 2014 Urgent Care Chart Survey of 150 million visits by patients to more than 800 different urgent care clinics, conducted by the Journal of Urgent Care Medicine, reveal that the top three most-prescribed medications at U.S. urgent care centers were, in descending order: Zithromax (azithromycin), for 12.12% of visits Amoxil (amoxicillin), for 8.25% of visits Deltasone (prednisone), for 7.07% of visits The top 20 medications are shown here. We will report on …
Read MoreQ. How do I use Excludes 1 and Excludes 2 instructions in International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10CM)? A. Put simply, the Excludes 1 notation means that you cannot code any excluded code with the main (listed) code. Conditions listed with Excludes 1 are mutually exclusive. For example, code E11 (type 2 diabetes mellitus) has an Excludes 1 notation with the following codes listed: Diabetes mellitus due to underlying condition (E08.-) Drug …
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A 36-year-old man comes to an urgent care center reporting pain in his back that began the previous day. The pain is sharp and worse with certain changes in position. He does a lot of lifting at his job stocking shelves in a grocery store, but he cannot relate the onset of the pain to any specific lifting that he has done. View the image taken (Figure 1) and consider what your diagnosis would be.
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