Industry

An elderly lady who longer drives and has a scorching sore throat might be inclined to call an ambulance to take her to the emergency room. Clearly, it’s not an emergency but she’s got to see someone. In most places across the U.S. the end result will be a trip to the ED, which will have her waiting—for hours, maybe—and result in higher-than-necessary charges to Medicare. Under a new initiative in Seattle, however, it would …

With the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently adapting its stance on wearing masks in public to reduce risk for spreading COVID-19, urgent care operators are already using the new guidance to review their own practices and procedures. They’re also being encouraged to do so by fluctuations in patient volume. Tomah Health in Wisconsin, for example, is reopening its urgent care facility after closing it in January due to overwhelming COVID-19 cases in its …

Urgent care as an industry was on a steady growth path before February 2019. It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that subsequent low patient volumes and getting shut out of early distribution of COVID-19 testing supplies and vaccinations, respectively, put a damper on expectations for further progress—but that’s not the case. In fact, urgent care operators’ collective resilience and creativity in adapting to changing conditions (such as setting up testing or vaccination events in parking …

The urgent care industry has done a great job of making the case that it has the expertise and accessibility to be essential to the fight against COVID-19—a far cry from the early days when resources were channeled elsewhere. This was confirmed when the Centers for Disease Control and prevention made a point of including urgent care centers on the same level as emergency rooms in a study of the effectiveness of boosters for both the …

We don’t need to tell you how badly patient volumes suffered for a good stretch of the pandemic. Patients stayed away not just from urgent care centers, but all ambulatory care settings. The advent of vaccines and wider availability of testing supplies started to right the ship, but concerns have remained that “normal” visits—those for complaints unrelated to COVID-19—might take a while to return to pre-pandemic levels. An article just published by the Journal of …

Urgent care as an industry is in a precarious position as the COVID-19 pandemic surge rages on. Driven by the most transmissible variant to date, multiple states and major cities are grappling with their largest caseloads yet. Overcrowding in emergency rooms is so bad that hospital administrators and public health officials from Philadelphia to Iowa are recommending that patients stay away from the ED if at all possible and opt to visit their closest urgent …

With the last days of 2021 winding down, some parts of the country are as deeply embedded in the COVID-19 pandemic as they’ve ever been. In New York City, urgent care centers are seeing up to five times their normal volume while at the same time grappling with staffing shortages (which are at least partially due to the virus to begin with). Patients need care for all the “normal” urgent care complaints while locations are …

We’re all aware that it can be difficult for some regions of the United States to attract enough top-tier providers to meet the needs of smaller communities. JUCM has been covering this issue for years, in fact (see Rural and Tertiary Markets: The Next Urgent Care Frontier). And that’s during “normal” times. Lack of access, sometimes poor healthcare literacy, and the politicization of COVID-19 has put an inordinate amount of additional stress on rural health …

Urgent care was notoriously overlooked as a key contributor early in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, first as a testing resource and then as a powerful partner in vaccination campaigns. At least one urgent care company is ensuring that the industry will be represented in research into not only preventing the virus, but also establishing definitive treatments for ill patients. Houston-based Next Level Urgent Care says it is launching three clinical trials to evaluate …