Practice Management
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 …
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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, …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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, …
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It’s taken a while for data to catch up with the potential harm that could await children who contract COVID-19, but it’s becoming clearer that children who become severely ill with the virus may have certain things in common with kids who have better-understood conditions. Urgent care providers should be wary of assuming that similarities in presenting characteristics equate to similar trajectories ahead, however. A new study just published by the Journal of the American …
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