Practice Management
The decision to operate a lab on site at your urgent care center is not one to be taken lightly. While saying “yes” would lead to another layer of overhead and regulation, it could also make life easier for your patients—possibly meaning they’ll become loyal customers. Besides that, though, how much space would it occupy? How much volume would the lab need for it to be a worthwhile endeavor? CLIA specialist Milly Keeler will answer …
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After months of legislative back-and-forth, and as we previewed here last month, the US House of Representatives has passed new legislation that essentially repeals the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or “Obamacare”). The Senate already voted to approve the bill, called the Restoring America’s Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act, after implementing changes to the original version. Proponents of the new bill—which President Obama has already promised to veto—say it would cut the federal deficit by $516 billion …
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Urgent care is about to get even more accessible for members of Kaiser Permanente Northwest. The plan is offering phone or video visits with no copay for patients who don’t feel up to an in-person encounter in the urgent care center. Appointments to video chat with a provider can be made on the Kaiser website and conducted with any smartphone, laptop, or desktop computer that has a video camera. The providers will have access to members’ …
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URGENT MESSAGE: Ongoing success requires that the urgent care operator keep his or her eyes open for opportunities to improve the patient experience. The challenge is that the operator can become desensitized by what he/she sees every day. In this guest blog, Lou Ellen Horwitz explains that effective operators must “take their blinders off” in order to experience the operation the way patients do. Lou Ellen Horwitz is Director of Learning at Seattle-based Immediate Clinic. …
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United Surgical Partners International (USPI) added 35 urgent care centers to its portfolio by virtue of acquiring CareSpot Express Healthcare, a regional provider in Florida and Tennessee. United Surgical Partners International Acquires CareSpot Express Healthcare. CareSpot will operate as a division of USPI, managing the 35 centers plus 46 MedPost Urgent Care locations owned by Tenet. No changes in brand identity are planned, currently. The deal comes on the heels of CareSpot spending much of …
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Cepheid has inked a deal with Henry Schein Medical to distribute its GeneXpert System and menu of Xpert tests for healthcare-associated infections, critical infectious disease, and sexual health in more than 10,000 laboratory customers in the United States—urgent care centers among them. Previously, the GeneXpert System could be found mainly in hospital laboratories. Subject to FDA review of the GeneXpert Omni System and associated tests, Henry Schein will also distribute Cepheid’s CLIA-waived products for the …
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As public health officials in California warn of a jump in reported cases of norovirus—also known as winter vomiting disease—across the state, a preholiday gathering in Seattle illustrates the speed with which the virus can wreak havoc in tightly packed events. The California Department of Public Health has confirmed 32 outbreaks that sickened hundreds between October and the end of 2015. Meanwhile, more than 200 people came down with symptoms of norovirus, which include abdominal …
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Some urgent care operators may be starting the new year with old worries about what the Affordable Care Act, known alternately as ACA or Obamacare, means for their centers. More specifically, there is concern that the shift away from PPO, in which patients can choose any provider in their network, to more rigid HMOs—many of which require patients to have preauthorization/referral to use urgent care or pay increased steerage—could hurt the industry. Where optimists hoped …
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Urgent care centers that align themselves with schools and youth athletic programs should take note of a study showing that a blood test was able to confirm concussions in children with 94% accuracy—and to provide critical information on the severity of the concussion. While the reliability of the test was “competitive with CT scan,” it offered key advantages that may appeal to urgent care operators: namely, lower cost and none of the risks inherent to …
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It’s not news that operating margins can be very thin—making it all the more perplexing that so many practices leave money on the table by not billing or coding correctly. While the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has said it will not deny claims for incorrect codes during the first year following implementation of ICD-10 in October 2015, provided that submitted codes are within the right code family, that’s only the tip of the …
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