Practice Management
The aging population—clearly not a controllable factor—is high on the list of factors that will continue to drive up healthcare spending over the next decade, according to the just-released 2016 National Health Expenditures Report from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). National healthcare spending is projected to grow at a 5.8% annual rate, starting last year through 2025. If accurate, that means healthcare spending will rise from 17.5% in 2014 to 20.1% as …
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Yet another study indicates that “millennials”—individuals between 18 and 36 years of age—have a tough time affording basic healthcare costs (including insurance, in many cases). One out of five says they can’t afford routine health costs, while an additional 26% say they can afford routine healthcare costs, but with difficulty. The Harris Poll found that 70% consider cost to be a “very important” factor when looking for healthcare, and that 16% do not intend to …
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Local media, elected municipal officials, and residents who know a good—and necessary—thing when they see one united in welcoming a new urgent care to an underserved corner of western Kansas. St. Catherine Hospital first recognized the need for a new community health resource to offset the pressure building in its own overcrowded emergency room, where patients complained about having to wait hours—or months, in extreme cases—just to be seen by a physician. Garden City, now …
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Despite data proving that many emergency rooms are overcrowded, patient volume is down in U.S. hospitals overall, forcing administrators to consider novel business strategies, according to a new report from Frost & Sullivan Transformational Health Team. Basically, patients are looking for outpatient, minimally invasive care—and finding it with “ambulatory care” providers in urgent care clinics, ambulatory surgical centers, and retail locations. Hospitals are responding by considering partnerships and collaborations with such providers. Transformation of the …
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A new study by FAIR Health says too many busy millennials (defined by Pew Research as those who turned ages 15–34 in 2015) turn to WebMD or “Dr. Google” instead of checking in with a physician when they need medical care. While that’s bad news for providers in every setting—not to mention those patients—the good news for urgent care is that when they do commit to an in-person visit, they are more likely to choose …
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Do you know how to get to the MOB—or are you wondering why you’d even want to go there? More on that in a moment. Successful urgent center centers must provide a sufficiently positive experience that patients want to return, and tell others to do likewise. But great service doesn’t just happen; it’s the result of deliberate planning and coordination of systems, processes, policies, and people. When a patient approaches your center, what does he …
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Urgent Team expanded its holdings in the southeast corner of the country to 29 locations with the purchase of Physicians Care and its eight locations in Tennessee. Headquartered in Nashville, Urgent Team now owns four brands—Urgent Team, Sherwood Urgent Care, Baptist Health Urgent Care, and Physicians Care—in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Physicians Care was founded by Bill Meadows, MD, who was also the founding president of the Urgent Care Association of America; he will remain …
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Whether due to transportation issues, childcare needs, or concern about being exposed to others’ germs when they’re already not feeling well, some patients find “convenient care” not quite convenient enough. Remedy, an urgent care company in Austin, TX is one of a number of providers looking to fulfill their urgent care needs by leveraging the advantages of electronic communication to offer an old-fashioned convenience (namely, house calls). Designed to take convenient care to the next …
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We’ve seen lots of data indicating that patients worry about being able to afford good healthcare for themselves and their families. Those concerns go beyond the household budget, though: A new study shows that citizens are more concerned about domestic healthcare costs than any other financial issue. In fact, “healthcare costs” were named by nearly twice as many people as Social Security benefits, which was the second most mentioned concern (31% vs 16%), followed by …
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Patients who don’t need to be visiting the emergency room at all are too often not only evaluated, but admitted into the hospital through the ED. Some even wind up in critical care units, according to a new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine. While some patients may be heading to the ED because they’re unsure of the most appropriate setting for their symptoms, others claim lack of access to primary care as the main …
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