Industry

As in other parts of the country, the number of urgent care centers and other walk-in facilities continues to grow in Massachusetts. That’s great news for our industry, but the potential for urgent care to positively affect healthcare spending there has yet to be fulfilled. The problem, also as in some other parts of the country, is that too many people are still going to the emergency room for nonemergent complaints, according to the Commonwealth’s …

CVS Health and Aetna received approval to merge from the Department of Justice this week—provided that Aetna follows through on plans to sell its Medicare Part D business to a subsidiary of WellCare Health Plans in order to preserve competition in that market. CVS is already the leader in the Medicare Part D market, with Aetna fifth. The $69 billion deal will blend Aetna’s rich beneficiary data with CVS’s capability to provide point-of-service care, a …

No less than the Wall Street Journal has claimed that “secret deals” hospitals strike with health insurers contribute in a big way to runaway health spending in the United States. In Behind Your Rising Health-Care Bills: Secret Hospital Deals That Squelch Competition, the Journal describes “secret restrictions” such as “anti-steering clauses that prevent insurers from steering patients to less-expensive or higher-quality healthcare providers.” (Certainly urgent care would fall into one, if not both, of those …

Urgent care centers have been eating away at patient volumes previously owned by hospital systems, prompting those systems to get into the urgent care game by buying or building locations. Simply setting up shop may not be enough to recapture those patients, however, if they’re run along the same lines as the hospitals themselves, suggests an  analysis published by Becker’s Hospital Review. It goes so far as to suggest that hospital systems could learn a …

The Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Community Care (OCC) has said publicly that it wants to help veterans gain greater access to healthcare outside of the VA system. Naturally, as part of its contracting process, the OCC requires prospective contractors who want to treat those enrollees beyond the walls of a VA facility to share a fair amount of information. A lot of it is what you’d expect: name, address, DEA number, phone, fax, National …

Family physicians and psychiatrists are the most in-demand physicians and healthcare providers overall when it comes to recruiting assignments, but nurse practitioners are now third on the list, according to a report from MerrittHawkins, a subsidiary of AMN Healthcare. The authors attribute the sharp rise of nurse practitioners among recruiters seeking to fill positions to the growing number of retail clinics—and the ongoing growth of urgent care. In fact, “urgent care” was used as a …

Visits to emergency rooms continue to go up as hospital admissions drop in southern California, suggesting that either many of those flocking to the ED don’t need to be there or patients who need beds aren’t getting them, according to a new series of articles published in the Whittier Daily News. Either way, it would seem wider, acuity-appropriate use of urgent care resources would reduce the volume while increasing efficiency of care. Another solution being …

ChoiceOne/MedSpring, operators of more than 60 urgent care centers around the country, and life sciences company Quadrant Biosciences have entered a partnership to offer a new brain health assessment service at existing locations in Maryland and Texas. Called ClearEdge, the system was developed with experts at SUNY Upstate Medical University. It essentially packages together an array of functional assessments designed to monitor and track subtle changes in cognitive function, balance, and patient symptoms over time. …