Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

UCA Partners Up on Database to Help Patients Find Centers with COVID-19 Testing Resources

The urgent care community continues to find innovative ways to ensure it’s not left out of the discussion—and on the sidelines when lives are at stake—during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The latest development is an Urgent Care Association initiative, in partnership with Braid Health, to offer covid-test-finder.com, an online database highlighting urgent care clinics that offer COVID-19 diagnostic or antibody testing in local communities. In the press release announcing availability of the database, UCA CEO …

New Clues to Which Children May Be Headed for MIS-C—and Poor Outcomes

Parents and caregivers took some small degree of comfort as COVID-19 surged in “knowing” that the virus didn’t pose much of a risk to children—or so the thinking went at the time. Since then, we’ve become acquainted with multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), a related illness that does seem to pose a greater risk in younger patients. A new article published in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report reveals characteristics of MIS-C that could be …

More Rationale for Masking-Up: Viral Load May Be the Same for Symptomatic, Asymptomatic COVID-19 Patients

Some people scoff at the idea of wearing a mask because they “feel fine” and “would know” if they were sick and likely to pass COVID-19 along to others they come in contact with. If you talk to patients with that belief, share the conclusions of an article just published in JAMA Internal Medicine, which reveals that symptomatic and asymptomatic COVID-19 patients may be walking around with similar cycle thresholds. As the authors point out, …

The Rage Is Real; Is Your Team Prepared for Anti-Maskers?

You’ve probably seen videos of confrontations involving individuals who refuse to wear a face cover where one is required by local regulations or the proprietor to help stop the spread of COVID-19. Urgent care centers are not immune to this phenomenon. The question is, what would your staff do if a patient or family member came in without a mask and refused to comply with requests to put one on? An article just published in …

What’s the Prognostic Value of Loss of Smell in COVID-19 Patients?

Loss of smell was identified early on as one telltale sign of COVID-19 infection. However, a study just published in the Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology indicates that anosmia may actually be an independent prognostic sign of less severe illness. The study of 949 COVID-19–positive people found loss of smell to be significantly associated with decreased need for hospitalization, admission to the intensive care unit, intubation, and acute respiratory distress syndrome. The researchers found …

CDC Warns Urgent Care: Parents May Be Arriving with Concerns Over More than Flu and COVID-19

As parents and school districts wrestle with the safest way to begin the school year in light of COVID-19, public health officials are bracing themselves for the day flu season starts to overlap with the pandemic. So, news that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects new cases of acute flaccid myelitis to start mounting soon is concerning, to say the least. The CDC issued a warning that “2020 will be another peak year …

Can Artificial Intelligence Provide Real Value in Triaging Urgent Care Patients?

A crowded waiting room can stress out both front-desk staff and clinicians. And barring obviously emergent presentations, human error can occur when deciding which patient needs attention first. An article just published in Fortune magazine introduces a new machine learning-powered triage system that was created to streamline and assure appropriate triage—with a focus on urgent care. The new system, developed by a company called Epic, analyzes a patient’s electronic medical records and their current vital …

Are You Getting Reimbursed for Counseling Patients to Self-Isolate? Now You Can

When you spend time with a patient and counsel them to self-isolate due to concerns over COVID-19, you’re using the expertise you’ve developed through years of training and treating others. Up until now, however, there’s been no mechanism to reimburse you for that that time, which you could be spending to provide revenue-generating care. Recognizing this, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have announced that payment …

A Wrinkle in Schools Reopening: Kids Over 9-Years-Old Can Spread COVID-19 as Much as Adults

A not-yet-finalized study of COVID-19 contact tracing in South Korea indicates that children under the age of 9 have the lowest virus transmissibility rate among all age groups. While that’s good news in considering the risk to the youngest children and their close contacts, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, points out that the converse conclusion—that children 10 and up are fully capable of transmitting the disease—could spell …

UCA Joins with ASPR TRACIE to Advance the Role of Urgent Care in COVID-19

Recognizing its own potential to lead urgent care’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic on a national scale, the Urgent Care Association is working with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) on its Technical Resources, Assistance Center, and Information Exchange (TRACIE) program. UCA leaders met with ASPR TRACIE just a few weeks ago, in advance of a report for the emergency preparedness community about urgent care’s experiences, …