Practice Management
School nurses have their hands full on a good day, but the COVID-19 pandemic has added layers of responsibility for temperature taking, educating the educators on protocols for the virus, figuring out which children could have been exposed to which family whose father was just diagnosed with the virus…. Even with many states announcing plans to return to “normal” in the fall, it’s likely that precautions (and certainly concerns) will continue for the foreseeable future. …
Read More
Burnout is an ongoing problem in urgent care and other practice environments. It’s been exacerbated since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. We know this already. But JAMA Network Open just published new data that shed light on the biggest culprits, which in turn could give you a leg up on helping your providers maintain a healthy perspective and peak productivity. According to the article, based on a cross-sectional study of 1,310 clinicians, gender and …
Read More
As states start softening or dropping restrictions on the number of people who can gather inside and out, and even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is looking at where and when masks should be considered “essential,” a disturbing trend threatens to blow up all the progress that’s been made in curbing the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past month, there’s been a steady decline in the number of people making visits strictly to get …
Read More
As JUCM and JUCM News readers know, Walmart has taken any number of stabs at trying to establish a successful healthcare business (all to no avail, at this point). Having failed to gain traction with physical Walmart Health locations, they’ve now gone the virtual route by acquiring telehealth provider MeMD and parted ways with a number of Walmart Health senior executives in the process. Whether you view the latest move as evolution in its strategy …
Read More
A New York City urgent care operator is being sued by a former employee who says he was instructed by upper management to over-dilute COVID-19 vaccine in order to stretch the supply, and subsequently fired when he and other employees complained about the alleged scheme. The company, which runs several vaccination sites in the borough of Queens, denies issuing any such instructions to its vaccinators. What’s alleged, however, is that they were told to use …
Read More
Recently, we told you about an Associated Press article reporting that while “suspicious” child deaths have risen since the COVID-19 pandemic began, reports of suspected child abuse dropped. The presumption was that professionals with a duty to report, such as teachers, coaches, and clergy, simply were not seeing children up close and therefore were not privy to signs of abuse. Now an article published by JAMA Network confirms that reports went down at the outset …
Read More
Urgent care professionals as a group are among the most trusted healthcare workers. How else can you explain the public’s willingness to trust their healthcare to a stranger in ever-growing numbers? It’s especially important, then, to ensure that your team is educating patients and making recommendations for vaccination against the COVID-19 vaccine from a place of experience and credibility. Unfortunately, that can’t be said in some quarters—and the consequences are starting to become evident. Cleveland …
Read More
For too long, urgent care was perceived as the ugly stepchild of various other practice settings—emergency medicine light, doc-in-a-box…pick your dismissive stereotype. Given the evolution of ownership structures since then, from entrepreneurial physicians to venture capitalists and major health systems, it shouldn’t be a surprise that a key metric—physician salaries—have actually started trending higher than some longer-established specialties. According to new data from the American Medical Group Association and published online as a slideshow by …
Read More
The COVID-19 pandemic seemed to have put a deep freeze on urgent care acquisitions, so maybe it’s a good sign of things to come that Bain Capital just announced a deal to acquire New England-based ConvenientMD from Starr Investment Holdings. While the value of the deal was not revealed, ConvenientMD’s 26 locations in Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire took in around $105 million in revenue last year. Early plans under the new ownership call for …
Read More
The COVID-19 pandemic has put a strain on volunteer organizations just as it has businesses, school systems, and healthcare organizations. Not only have usually committed volunteers been forced to stay home instead of donating their time and efforts for the good of others, but in the economic downturn fundraising has been at its lowest point in years, across the board. So, now that we’re in the early stages of a comeback, it’s heartening to see …
Read More