UCA’s Survey Committee has conducted two annual member surveys, to date, designed to establish benchmarks in an industry for which data have been sorely lacking. Each month in Developing Data, we will share one or two tidbits from the second annual survey in an effort to help readers get a sense of what their peers are doing, and what kind of trends are developing as urgent care evolves. In this issue: If you’re planning to …
Read MoreClinical Challenge 2: May 2007
The patient is a 13-year-old male who presented to urgent care after taking a fall while running; he landed on his outstretched left hand. Upon examination, you find tenderness in the snuff box and observe swelling around the wrist. View the x-ray taken (Figure 1) and consider what your diagnosis and next steps would be. Resolution of the case is described on the next page.
Read MoreAdditional Income from After-Hours Codes (99050, 99051, 99053)
DAVID STERN, MD (Practice Velocity) Q.A patient with a finger laceration walked into our urgent care center at 8:05 p.m., five minutes after our closing time. Rather than turn the patient away, our team decided to care for the patient. Three of our staff, including the physician, stayed for 50 minutes after our posted closing time. If we had not stayed after our scheduled closing time, the patient would have been forced to go to …
Read MoreOverview of a Malpractice Trial (and How to Survive)
JOHN SHUFELDT, MD, JD, MBA, FACEP It’s game day. The trial begins today and your fate will be decided by a jury of your “peers.” Never mind the fact that none of them are physicians, only three have been to college, and two did not even graduate from high school; in the eyes of the law, they are your peers and will be the ones to decide if your care met the standard of care. …
Read MoreReturn-on-Investment in Occupational Health Sales
FRANK H. LEONE, MBA, MPH It began with two cavemen, or even before: Bartering. Fair trade. A transaction where both parties (theoretically) walk away satisfied that they got a positive return on their exchange. This concept persists to this very day. At a minimum, your urgent care clinic should understand return-on-investment (ROI) for two occupational health staples: work injury management and pre-placement physical examinations. Work Injury Management Employers need to get workers back to work …
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Are DNA Relationship Testing Services a Good Match for Urgent Care?
Urgent message: The last 10 years have seen a dramatic increase in DNA parentage testing. Yet, the DNA testing industry remains, in essence, unregulated. Can urgent care providers fulfill a need for ethical and clinically reliable access, while receiving direct and immediate payment for your services? Elizabeth Panke, MD, PhD For many generations, defining the parent-child relationship was easy. The woman who gave birth to the child was the child’s legal mother; to a large …
Read MoreThe Road to Recognition
Lee A. Resnick, MD, FAAFP The recent announcement that the American Board of Medical Specialties approved Hospice and Palliative Care as a new subspecialty appears to ring in a new era of subspecialty acceptance. It was once thought that subspecialties found their homes with one sponsor; Cardiology, Gastroenterology, and Pulmonology were all within the realm of Internal Medicine. Pediatrics followed suit with its own versions of these subspecialties. There was no con-joint sponsorship from multiple …
Read MoreQuality of Care
KENNETH V. ISERSON, MD, MBA, FAAEM, FACEP “Quality of care,” due to both its nebulous nature and its vital importance, has always been a much-discussed issue in medical ethics. For example, the Codes of Hammurabi, the Hippocratic writings, and other early medical treatises discuss quality of care. Today, the changing goals and priorities within healthcare systems and the ongoing attempts to restructure local, state, and national health treatment delivery systems have increased the importance of …
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Management of Erythema Multiforme in the Urgent Care Setting
Urgent message: With the increasing use of medications, especially antibiotics, more and more patients are presenting to urgent care with erythema multiforme. Correct diagnosis and identification of the underlying cause can result in rapid clinical resolution of the lesions. Shailendra Kapoor, MD Descriptions of erythema multiforme (EM) first appeared in the work of Albert and Bazin in 1822, but it was not until 1866 that von Hebra categorized these erythematous eruptions and labeled them “erythema …
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