Industry

Anyone who works in urgent care and saw an industry article published recently under The Business Journals umbrella was probably taken aback by a headline that began Urgent Care Is Dead. Given that this was followed by Long Live Urgent Care, it seems the author of the headline was trading on the old expression The king is dead, long live the king for shock value. If you read the article, though, you were probably pleasantly …

A pair of not-for-profit consumer advocacy groups have renewed calls for the urgent care industry to be more regulated by the government, claiming that urgent care centers and retail clinics simply are not affordable for low-income patients, according to an article recently published by Modern Healthcare. The issue could be resolved, they say, if the government required these facilities to provide care for patients covered by Medicaid. As urgent care veterans know, the problem here …

The past year has brought nonstop changes in how Americans live their daily lives. What used to be typical behavior became foolhardy. People stopped going to doctors for nonemergent complaints to a large extent, with urgent care suffering downturns in patient volume (temporarily, though some practices are still trying to catch up). Bearing that in mind, the Urgent Care Association, of which JUCM is the official publication, in the interest of full disclosure, has adapted …

Utah state legislators just voted to expand physician assistants’ ability to practice without physician supervision. North Dakota did the same 2 years ago. While that’s clearly a nod to advanced practice providers’ essential role in administering healthcare, as well as a concession to the downturn in physicians choosing to practice primary care, there are concerns among some in the urgent care community that the trend toward recognizing care provided PAs and nurse practitioners on the …

A couple of years ago, stories of patients getting surprise bills from freestanding emergency rooms—often based on the mistaken presumption that they had actually visited an urgent care center—ran rampant. Legislation in various states reduced the risk of that happening, and urgent care centers did their part by taking great pains to differentiate themselves from freestanding ERs. However, now that COVID-19 testing has become both common and urgently necessary, patients are again getting stung by …

We’ve told you recently that the Urgent Care Association is involved in both lobbying and public advocacy to advance the cause of urgent care operators in regard to COVID-19 testing and immunization. They’ve been successful enough in raising the industry’s profile that UCA is now assisting some local health departments with strategizing vaccine rollout to healthcare workers—but they’re asking for your help to move the ball even further down the field. The Association has developed …

Urgent care was overlooked by public health entities at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic—but the College of Urgent Care Medicine and the Urgent Care Association are fighting to ensure that never happens again. That’s of critical importance as cases continue to rise in various parts of the country and the vaccine continues to roll out. Most recently, UCA got in touch with every state vaccination administrator and/or governor’s public health advisor to advocate on …

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic last spring, many emergency rooms were slammed with patients who either had COVID-19 or were terrified they could have it. And while urban, hospital-aligned urgent care centers saw similar crippling volumes, many others had empty waiting rooms as patients who had relatively minor concerns stayed home out of fear they’d be exposed to the virus. Now as 2021 dawns there’s a greater understanding of who is really …