Practice Management
If patients walk out the door because the wait in your clinic is too long, that doesn’t have to signal lost business. You can still capture the revenue that would have been generated on the spot and maintain good customer service by encouraging them to visit another of your company’s locations. Take Intermountain Healthcare (IHC), which operates 31 InstaCare/KidsCare centers across Utah. Within the Salt Lake Valley, these urgent care locations are typically no more …
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Sudden fever, shortness of breath, chills…just the kind of “funk” that leads countless patients to the urgent care center. Well-informed providers are learning to look a little closer at such patients, though, with 21 people having died this year already from a usually obscure bacterial infection. Elizabethkingia anophelis is marked by symptoms often synonymous with the common cold, though its outcomes can be far more serious. Scores of cases have been reported in Illinois, Michigan, …
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The first stop for many patients in search of a physician is their health plan’s provider directory. If a new study published in Health Affairs is any indication, though, they might be better off consulting Google—or even the yellow pages—to find their closes urgent care center for prompt attention. The problem is that directories are often inaccurate, with roughly 30% of callers discovering the physician has a specialty other than the one listed in the …
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Project ECHO—Extension for Community Health Outcomes—has helped physicians in rural New Mexico connect with specialists their patients would otherwise never be able to see since 2003. Now a pair of out-of-state senators want to see the program become the model for a national system telehealth system. The ECHO Act, cosponsored by Sens. Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Orrin Hatch of Utah, would require the Department of Health and Human Services to work with the Health …
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Alaska is the latest of many states marching toward adoption of new telehealth bills, but legislators there has been typically “maverick” in their approach to adopting such new technologies. The interesting thing about that state’s soon-to-be signed law is that physicians won’t have to be in-state in order to prescribe for Alaskans. In addition to removing in-state presence requirements for prescribing via telemedicine, SB 74 will pave the way for patients to connect with occupational …
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Eighty urgent care centers in Los Angeles County, California are closing ranks in an effort to stem runaway abuse of opioid analgesics. Working in concert with the county health department, Safe Med LA signees pledge to follow opioid prescribing guidelines established by the American Academy of Emergency Medicine; to consider screening more patients for opioid misuse or addiction; and to stop refilling “lost” opioid prescriptions and scripts written for chronic pain. Urgent care centers started …
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Arizona is home to the largest measles outbreak in the U.S., currently. That by itself does not warrant headlines, but health officials there have traced all 22 cases since May to a single detention center. The importance to urgent care operators—especially those that provide occupational health services—is that the outbreak is blamed, in part, one the refusal of some workers at the Eloy Detention Center to get vaccinated. Detainees there have all been vaccinated at …
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A couple who both complained of vomiting and diarrhea on a Saturday morning could easily be dismissed as partygoers who overindulged the night before. William Rose, MD, FACEP took the time to dig a little deeper, though, and ultimately wound up heading off a possible Salmonella outbreak in West Virginia. The WVU Urgent Care physician thought the symptoms were more indicative of food poisoning than a sour stomach; he told the health department as much …
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If there’s truth to the cliché that “first impressions are everything,” then as a retail and service business, urgent care should put its best foot forward whenever patients enter the center, providing a greeting not dissimilar to what shoppers expect when entering a retail store. In recent weeks I’ve visited three urgent care centers and upon crossing the entry threshold, experienced three completely different “welcomes.” In the first center, I was greeted by multiple signs pointing …
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URGENT MESSAGE: As payers introduce new clauses into urgent care-specific contracts, urgent care operators need to be vigilant to how several changes may affect their day-to-day operations. Kelly Mattingly is Director of Contracting & Credentialing at Practice Velocity, LLC, and a contracting and credentialing consultant with Urgent Care Consultants. With each new clause, provider contracts offered by payers become more complex, adding a host of burdens to the day-to-day operations of the urgent care center—eg, …
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