Industry

Results of the latest “snapshot” survey from the Urgent Care Association indicate that things could be looking up, at last, for urgent care centers. While the sample size is small (103 respondents), the results indicate that at least some operators are expanding services and seeing downward trends reverse. For one thing, 80% of responding urgent care centers are now offering telemedicine services, with a median of five encounters per day. That doesn’t appear to be …

You don’t need to be told that these are hard times for urgent care. In addition to the very real problems many individual operators, clinicians, and staffers are experiencing thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, the industry as a whole is facing uncertainty. Even the Urgent Care Association’s annual convention had to be recast as a virtual event. Still, UCA is continuing in its mission to advocate and serve as a resource for the urgent care …

Some urgent care operators, especially those in hard-hit areas like New York City, have been in the thick of the fight against COVID-19 from the start. Others experienced dramatic drop-offs in patient visits (and still may be) before developing plans that would allow them to serve their communities in new and different ways; classifying some locations as testing centers and launching telemedicine services allowed them to continue bringing in revenue while providing much-needed care. Now …

We’ve heard anecdotally that some urgent care operations are experiencing serious shortfalls in patient volume, while others are “all hands on deck” in dealing with patients who have, or are concerned they have, COVID-19. To get a better handle on how the industry as a whole is faring, the Urgent Care Association started surveying members on a weekly basis. In the initial iteration, 82% of respondents reported that all their centers were open while 18% …

As you may have seen, the Urgent Care Association just came out with the latest version of its Urgent Care Benchmarking Report. And if you weren’t aware of that until now, be assured that other segments of the healthcare marketplace have noticed. Becker’s Hospital Review, in fact, alerted their online readers to the report’s update recently, highlighting three key pieces of data. After relaying that the urgent care marketplace continues to grow across the board, …

We tend to look at the urgent care industry as an American phenomenon (which is understandable, given the total emersion necessary to keep pace with patient demands and maintaining compliance with a bevy of regulations issued by payers, state boards, HIPAA…). However, the same revolution that has been taking place in the U.S. for decades is ongoing in countries around the world. New Zealand, for example, has a very active urgent care marketplace and a …

As efforts to grant pharmacists authority to prescribe certain medications pick up in some states, concern is growing among urgent care insiders that such a change in the clinical landscape could actually be detrimental to patients’ health, and certainly degrade the value that urgent care and other provider-based settings have to offer. The potential risk to patients was illustrated in a recent New York Times article that detailed how overwhelmed pharmacists already are, working long …

Pre-exposure prophylactic treatment against HIV (PrEP) has been a controversial topic in urgent care. While the lifesaving potential of the once-daily pill is undeniable, some operators and clinicians believe offering it encourages high-risk behaviors. Others say it’s too difficult to receive fair compensation for the high level of patient education and follow-up that’s required. Some, on the other hand, say the hassle is worth the satisfaction of doing what one can to curb a serious …

By this point, it isn’t news that preferences among patients are changing—away from traditional primary care, toward walk-in care with providers they might not necessarily ever see again. It’s plain that the doctor–patient relationship ain’t what it used to be. The change could be just as good for savvy urgent care operators at is bad for old-fashioned family practices, however. This is borne out by research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine this month. …

Nurse practitioners are gaining in both responsibility and numbers in the urgent care industry (as are physician assistants). The appeal is that it costs less to employ the average NP than it does the average physician, with no loss in prescribing authority. Employing advanced practice providers (APPs) in general allows an urgent care operator to handle more patients efficiently without adding dramatically to payroll. According to research published recently in the journal Health Affairs, the …