Practice Management
Missourians who still haven’t gotten the message that the emergency room is the wrong place to be for a sore throat or other nonemergent complaints are in for a rude awakening if they’re covered by Anthem. Starting this summer, Anthem will stop paying a dime for visits to Missouri EDs if the patient is deemed to have a “minor ailment” (which, in addition to sore throat, includes, rash, mild fever, and ear or eye pain—anything …
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Brooklyn (NY) Borough President Eric Adams has a message for basketball fans, concert goers, and cinephiles in his native environs: Stay out of the emergency room unless you absolutely have to be there; the urgent care center is often a much better, faster, and less costly option. Adams is so keen on that message that he recorded a series of public service announcements that play in the Barclays Center arena and high-end movie theaters in …
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It can be easy to become complacent about doing driver physicals required by the Department of Transportation. “Rubber stamping” them can have dire consequences for the patient, the employer, and the general public, and even raise your legal risk, however. Occ med and urgent care giant Concentra has been hit with a class action lawsuit in connection with a multiple-fatality bus crash in Maryland last November. The complaint claims that Concentra knew or should have …
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Urgent care and occupational medicine seem to go together naturally—small wonder, then, that 91% of urgent care centers offer some form of occupational medicine services, according to a mini survey from the Urgent Care Association. It’s profitable, too; of the centers that do have occ med, over half said it accounts for up to 15% of their business. Part of that success lies in offering quality services at a reasonable price, but you still have …
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There aren’t many things more truly urgent than a child considering suicide. More adolescents kill themselves than die from cancer, heart disease, and many other causes combined, in fact. Now researchers at the University of Missouri‒Kansas City School of Medicine say a brief screening tool designed to detect suicidal risk was shown to be effective in a pediatric urgent care clinic. Considering previous studies showing that 17% of high school students had seriously considered suicide—and …
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Urgent care clinicians, operators, and staff will gather in Houston at one of the larger regional urgent care conferences in the country later this month. The 2-day Southwest Urgent Care Conference offers both a Clinical Track and a Leadership track in deference to the unique makeup of the industry, with clinicians often also being business owners and corporate leaders. The clinical curriculum was also designed with consideration for the fact that nurse practitioners and physician …
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Oncology is not likely to pop up on a list of specialties formerly pursued by urgent care clinicians, and patients are not going to be getting chemo at their neighborhood urgent care center. Nonetheless, familiarity with various cancers—and even more importantly, their treatments and complications—is reaching need-to-know status for urgent care providers. Whether it’s sudden concerns over symptoms of infection or even “just” a high fever, cancer patients need immediate care more often than patients …
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Less than 3 years ago, barely more than half of healthcare providers used telemedicine and related services. Today, however, that proportion sits ag 71%, according to two new HIMSS Analytics studies that analyzed inpatient and outpatient telemedicine. The data indicate that “hub-and-spoke” models, in which the flow of care draws patients from lower acuity outpatient settings to larger, more comprehensive facilities, are the most popular, accounting for 59.6% of provider use. (These are more common …
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Pamela Sullivan, MD, MBA, FACP, PT was officially introduced as the newly elected president of the Urgent Care Association’s Board of Directors during the 2017 Urgent Care Convention & Expo, held this week in National Harbor, MD. Sullivan takes over from Steve Sellars, MBA, who served as president for the 2016–2017 term. In accepting the position, she stressed the necessity to help patients understand “their evolving healthcare options, while innovating new business models and processes …
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Urgent Message: While giving injections in urgent care may seem like a rote task, the significant safety risks of errors require that providers and staff pay special attention to the “Six Rs” when giving each and every injection. Unlike other service industries, when you ask people why they go into healthcare, the answer is typically “to help people.” Given your genuine and innate drive to improve the health and wellbeing of your patients, how awful …
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