Practice Management
This image was taken of a 35-year-old man who presented to the urgent care center with blood in the anterior chamber of his eye after he was hit in the eye with a baseball. He bled from his nose, and his right eye swelled shut because of eyelid edema. Initial nasal hemorrhage was controlled, but he was referred to the emergency department because of pain in the inferior orbit. View the image taken (Figure 1) …
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This image was taken on a 6-year-old male who was wrestling with his cousins when he developed severe pain in his right foot. There was bruising and swelling over the dorsum of the right foot. View the images taken (Figure 1) and consider what your diagnosis would be.
Read MoreData from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Aetna show that as the cost of health care treatment continues to rise, urgent care offers a compelling low-cost alternative for delivering care outside the hospital. By transitioning unnecessary emergency department visits to urgent care, $18 billion in savings is projected to be possible. In this issue: Low-Cost Setting as a Driver of Urgent Care Industry Growth
Read MoreQ. What is an acceptable income per patient visit for an urgent care clinic? A. The recent benchmarking survey completed by the Urgent Care Association (UCA) found that the average urgent care center collects $110 per patient. However, the “acceptable” net revenue per patient visit varies widely from center to center and state to state. It fluctuates based on many variables: Existing contracts from payors State (e.g., payors in California and Arizona typically have lower …
Read MorePulse oximetry and decision-making on hospitalization Key point: Use of pulse oximetry to decide on necessity of hospitalization may need to be reconsidered. Citation: Schuh, S, Freedman S, Coates A. et al. Effect of oximetry on hospitalization in bronchiolitis, JAMA. 2014; 312(7):712-718. Pulse oximetry has been used to help decide when an infant with bronchiolitis should be hospitalized. The authors of this study postulated that providers may be relying too heavily on it, resulting in …
Read MoreTHE CASE This x-ray was taken on a woman who fell off a ladder. View the image taken (Figure 1) and consider what your diagnosis would be.
Read MoreJohn Shufeldt, MD, JD, MBA, FACEP One of the moderately entertaining aspects of law school was answering hypotheticals (“hypos”) in class. They would go something like this: “Mr. Shufeldt, suppose that an off-duty police officer witnesses what she believes is an aggravated assault. Without identifying herself as a police officer, she disarms the assailant and, while doing so, the gun discharges and the bullet strikes and kills a bystander, who happens to be an emancipated …
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Urgent message: Urgent care clinicians should consider the possibility of cholecystitis when evaluating patients with cardiac symptoms. A delay in diagnosis may lead to serious complications, including sepsis. ALONA D. ANGOSTA, PhD, APRN, NP-C, and BRYAN HOLMES, NREMTP Introduction Patients with acute cholecystitis typically complain of right-upper-quadrant pain that radiates to the right shoulder and back, fever, and leukocytosis.1 The pain may also be associated with nausea or vomiting. However, acute cholecystitis can mimic cardiac …
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Urgent message: In a volume-driven business like urgent care, marketing should be viewed as an investment with a financial return that can be measured in order to allocate the center’s advertising dollars among the tactics most effective in generating patient revenue. ALAN A. AYERS, MBA, MAcc Practice Velocity Success in the “business” of urgent care boils down to one factor: “feet through the door.” That’s because once a center’s fixed costs are covered, each additional …
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