Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Sometimes It’s Not Prescribing, but Taking Away Medications That Saves a Life

Unfortunately, many patients become unknowing conduits to illicit use of prescription drugs, consequent addiction, and sometimes even death. They receive an appropriate prescription for, say, an opioid pain medication that they take responsibly for as long as necessary. Then they put the remaining pills back in the medicine cabinet, where anyone in the house can get hold of them and take them recreationally or to feed an addiction. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration created the …

New Guidelines Stress Appropriate Treatment for a Deadly Combination: Flu + CAP

It’s widely believed that the number of flu deaths is much higher than data would lead us to believe each year, due to the fact that cause of death is often attributed to complications from flu. One of the main culprits is community-acquired pneumonia. So, for the first time in more than 10 years, the Infectious Diseases Society of America has updated its guidelines on treating CAP. The take-home message is that adults who test …

Is Mental Health Urgent Care Ready for Primetime? One Company Is Willing to Find Out

Numerous urgent care centers have dabbled in mental health urgent care over the years, to little positive effect in terms of patient volume or revenue. Times—and marketplaces—change, however. In rural areas, especially, where both medical and mental health providers can be few and far between, the idea of offering a broader array of services that include counseling might work. At least one urgent care operator is making a serious effort to find out if that’s …

Dismiss Potential Diagnoses Based on a Patient’s Age and You’re Inviting Death and Litigation

An Alabama urgent care center learned the hardest possible way that it’s a mistake to assume a young, healthy-appearing patient wouldn’t have a life-threatening condition in spite of worsening symptoms. The patient in question was a 20-year-old college student who first presented with shortness of breath, chest pain, headache, and sore throat. The diagnosis reached that day was bronchitis, for which she received a prescription for an antibiotic and advice to return if her symptoms …

Not Getting Good Results from Its Clinics, Walgreens is Closing Stores to Focus on Telehealth

Walgreens is shutting down nearly half of its in-store clinics due to stronger-than-anticipated competition, such as from the still-growing urgent care sector, and will instead start focusing more on telehealth services. The 200 retail locations that will remain open will mostly be those run through healthcare partnerships and focus more on complex and chronic health conditions like asthma, as opposed to immediate care. According to a recent post from mHealth Intelligence, Walgreens’ decision is part …

Doing Well? Let Your Community Know!

Visits to Zoom+Care locations are growing at a double-digit pace in both the Seattle and Portland markets, prompting the company to hire over a hundred new workers in order to meet the increased demand. How do we know this? The good news was called out in the Portland Business Journal recently, after which that article was blasted out via social media by Zoom+Care itself—for thousands of prospective patients and business leaders to see. The growth …

What Would Doing Away with ‘Incident-to’ Billing Mean for NPs and PAs—and Urgent Care?

The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission’s unanimous recommendation that Congress do away with “incident-to” billing could have a strong effect on physician assistants and nurse practitioners—and therefore, considering the growing role PAs and NPs play in this setting, on urgent care overall. If incident-to billing is eliminated, PAs and NPs will have to bill independently and at a lower reimbursement rate than they do now. Currently, the services of PAs and NPs who are truly assisting …

Study: Despite Slow Starts, Large Health Systems Plan to Continue Growing into Urgent Care

A new GoHealth Urgent Care-supported study by The Health Management Academy indicates that 74% of leading health systems are likely to expand their urgent care presence over the next 5 years, though only 11% say they’re “thriving” in urgent care at this point. (For purposes of the survey, “leading health systems” include the top 25 U.S. health systems based on net patient revenue per health system.) According to Thriving in the Urgent Care Market: The …

Millennial Physicians: High in Numbers, Hard to Recruit—Here’s What You Need to Know

Much has been written and said about the preferences of patients in the Millennial generation (defined by Pew Research as anyone born between 1981 and 1996). And rightly so; they’re a sizable portion of your prospective patient population. What may be overlooked, however, is the fact that this same age segment also makes up a sizable portion of your prospective workforce, including physicians. In fact, according to a blog post on the UCA website, authored …

Free JUCM Webinar: Doing Your Part to Stem Deadly Antibiotic Resistance

It’s estimated that 23,000 people in the United States die from drug-resistant infections annually. Overuse and inappropriate use of antibiotics is one of the key culprits in that phenomenon. And yet, antibiotics are an indispensable weapon against disease; ceasing to prescribe them is not an option. The only answer is for all healthcare providers to prescribe responsibly. To learn more about what that really means in the urgent care center, carve out some time to …