StuWilli, Author at Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Image Check: Impact of Employee Appearance on the Patient Experience

Urgent message: Patients often infer quality on the basis of outward appearances. Adopting a policy that addresses clothing, grooming, and body art can help balance the need to project a professional image in the urgent care center and to ensure workplace safety with employees’ desire to express themselves. ALAN A. AYERS, MBA, MAcc Practice Velocity Remember the popular 1990s advertising slogan “Image is everything”? What was back then a trendy catchphrase created to peddle expensive …

March 2015

Fracture Codes, Strapping and Splint Application Codes, S9088

Q. I was told that we can no longer use code 80100 for drug screens. We have several employers who send employees and potential employees to our urgent care center for pre-employment, random, and post-accident drug screens. What code should we use now? A. Effective January 1, 2015, several drug-screen Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes were deleted by the American Medical Association: 80100: “Drug screen, qualitative; multiple drug classes chromatographic method, each procedure” 80101: “. …

Developing Data: March, 2015

Data from the IBISWorld Industry Report Urgent Care Centers in the US, March 2014 show that the urgent care market can be segmented by the source of payment for services. On the basis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau, IBISWorld finds that the main sources of revenue for urgent care are private insurance, Medicare, patients (out-of-pocket payments), and Medicaid. Private insurance accounted for about 54.8% of industry revenue in 2014. Many private insurance companies …

Abstracts in Urgent Care: March, 2015

Strict Rest Unnecessary After Concussion Key point: strict rest after a concussion offers no advantage over standard stepwise return to play. Citation: Thomas DG, Apps JN, Hoffmann RG, et al. Benefits of strict rest after acute concussion: a randomized controlled trial. Pediatrics 2015;135:213–223. Concussion treatment has been frequently debated. In this prospective study, patients with concussion were treated with either strict rest for 5 days or standard stepwise return to play. A total of 88 …

Is It Measles or Something Else?

Urgent message: Although measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, outbreaks continue to occur, with unvaccinated travelers most often being the carriers and transmitting the disease to clusters of unvaccinated individual residents. Overview and Current Outbreak According to the World Health Organization, 145,700 people around the world died of measles in 2013, which equates to 400 deaths per day or 16 deaths per hour. Measles remains one of the leading causes of …

Boy with Leg Rash, Knee Pain, and Abdominal Pain

This photograph was taken of a 6-year-old boy who presented with a rash on his legs. Two weeks earlier, he had an upper respiratory infection. His father said that he had 2 weeks of fever and headache before the rash began. The boy also reported knee pain and diffuse abdominal pain. On physical examination, purpuric papules were apparent on his lower extremities. View the image taken (Figure 1) and consider what your diagnosis would be.

Medical Boards: Part 2

JESSICA HOFFMANN, MS-4, and JOHN SHUFELDT, MD, JD, MBA, FACEP The probability that you will receive a certified letter from your medical board informing you about an investigation is relatively low. But one day, you may be one of the unlucky souls who receives such a letter. What do you do? Different boards have different rules about what gets reviewed or investigated and what does not. Some boards are mandated to investigate, at least to …

Developing Data: February, 2015

Abstracts in Urgent Care: February, 2015

Duration of Troponin Testing for ACS Key point: No definitive evidence for the 2-hour troponin rule-out for ACS. Citation: Kelly A–M, Klim S. Prospective external validation of an accelerated (2-h) acute coronary syndrome rule-out process using a contemporary troponin assay. Int J Emerg Med. 2014 Oct 16. doi: 10.1136/emermed-2014-204442. [Epub ahed of print.] As with other serious diseases, ruling out acute coronary syndrome (ACS) is a balance between not missing it and over testing or …