Industry

It’s widely recognized that while freestanding emergency rooms are perfectly good places to go for walk-in care, the cost associated with that care is exorbitant compared with urgent care (and even more so compared with primary care or retail clinics). The problem is compounded by the fact that many patients who visit freestanding EDs think they’re walking into an urgent care center and are later hit with surprise bills. A new study in Academic Emergency …

With the decade about to come to a close, Crain’s Health Pulse considered what some of the biggest healthcare stories of the 2010s were—concluding that the ongoing “rise of urgent care” is significant among them. A Look Back at the 2010s: The Rise of Urgent Care notes that what made the period of 2010–2019 so good for urgent care as a business model is likely to spur further growth in 2020 and beyond. Where evolving …

Not long ago, LabCorp started offering consumers the opportunity to order and administer some 90 different lab tests for themselves. Now comes word that Amazon is looking for a way to get into the home diagnostics business; according to CNBC, the company recently tried, but failed, to acquire a diagnostic start-up called Confer Health. Given Amazon’s ability to reach patients at home 24 hours a day, it stands to reason that a successful entry into …

The headline in quotes above actually appeared in Colorado’s Sky-Hi News this week, reflecting a self-assessed trend at Denver Health’s Winter Park Medical Center. The facility opened its own urgent care location almost a year ago, with the notion that the move might help alleviate crowding in its emergency room. Being at the base of a ski resort, however, they’ve seen more volume than a standard business model might predict; more predictably, they’ve found that …

Intermountain Healthcare and University of Utah Health have received a $1.8 million contract from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to conduct an antibiotic stewardship program in their urgent care centers. Around 700,000 patients visit Intermountain urgent care centers annually, with the number continuing to climb every year. The first step in the initiative will be trying to refine how patients view prescriptions themselves. For example, more patients who come in expecting to get …

Intermountain Healthcare and University of Utah Health have received a $1.8 million contract from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to conduct an antibiotic stewardship program in their urgent care centers. Around 700,000 patients visit Intermountain urgent care centers annually, with the number continuing to climb every year. The first step in the initiative will be trying to refine how patients view prescriptions themselves. For example, more patients who come in expecting to get …

The Utah Department of Health specifically called out greater utilization of urgent care as a key factor in reducing emergency room visits across the state—along with a corresponding decrease in associated costs, of course. While the report did not put a dollar amount on the savings, it does note that an average trip to the ED in the state costs five-and-a-half times more than an urgent care visit. Since the state DoH reports that around …

Amazon is investing more resources into Amazon Care, its in-house primary care program in Seattle. The company announced it’s buying Health Navigator, which provides technology and other services to digital health companies. While the financial details of the deal are undisclosed, last year Amazon plunked down $753 million to buy the online pharmacy company PillPack. The message is that they’re betting heavily that they can realize substantial cost savings by facilitating primary care for employees …

Much has been written and said about the preferences of patients in the Millennial generation (defined by Pew Research as anyone born between 1981 and 1996). And rightly so; they’re a sizable portion of your prospective patient population. What may be overlooked, however, is the fact that this same age segment also makes up a sizable portion of your prospective workforce, including physicians. In fact, according to a blog post on the UCA website, authored …

Texas has taken some hard knocks for the proliferation of freestanding emergency rooms there—especially in light of criticism of that industry for surprise billing. It seems too many patients walk into a freestanding ED thinking it’s an urgent care center, only to be socked with emergency room-like charges weeks or months later. The upside (for urgent care, anyway) is that the controversies prompted the Texas Association of Health Plans to do a study of cost …