Practice Management
The American Academy of Pediatrics has already decided that immunizing children with nasal spray just won’t cut it next flu season, again issuing a recommendation to use injectable flu vaccine instead. The AAP Board of Directors made the call after reviewing data on the effectiveness of this season’s flu shot compared with the nasal spray flu vaccine, which has not worked as well in recent years. It’s a slight break from the opinion of the …
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Urgent care centers have been eating away at patient volumes previously owned by hospital systems, prompting those systems to get into the urgent care game by buying or building locations. Simply setting up shop may not be enough to recapture those patients, however, if they’re run along the same lines as the hospitals themselves, suggests an analysis published by Becker’s Hospital Review. It goes so far as to suggest that hospital systems could learn a …
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We first told you in February that Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase were banding together to use then-unspecified means to put the brakes on high healthcare spending among their collective million-plus workers. They even hired a CEO for the joint healthcare project, still without any public acknowledgment of their plans. The picture is coming into clearer focus today, though, as Amazon is hatching a plan to establish urgent care-like clinics for on-site employees, starting with …
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Urgent care has become more prevalent across the country for years, but new data from Massachusetts put a number on its growth there that is likely higher than many would have predicted. The number of urgent care centers grew 800% from 2010 through the end of 2017, according to a report from the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission. Retail clinics are also multiplying, though at a lower rate. By way of explanation, the Commission said it …
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Advances in technology have smoothed many of the rough spots in keeping patient records, billing, and communication. The flip side of that is that healthcare consumers become more demanding all the time. Healthcare providers need to increase their focus on patient engagement to keep up. Urgent care operators actually have a great advantage in this area, as the nature of our business is inherently more consumer-oriented than, say, a traditional primary care office. The retail …
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As the summer winds down and families head out for one more adventure before the kids go back to school, campsites and rustic lakes are packed—not only with outdoor types, but hungry ticks. A recent post on Healthway.com gave consumers a ton of information on signs they may have been bitten by a tick or, worse, that they may have contracted a tick-borne disease. Surely other media outlets will be doing the same, perhaps compelling …
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Medical errors, no matter a clinician’s expertise or a facility’s reputation, are going to happen. A precious few are lethal, but even those that do not cause serious harm have the capacity to cripple your business when the affected patients take to social media or warn their friends and family to steer clear of your practice. A new Medscape post suggests only 1% of physicians are “master diagnosticians” who seldom make mistakes when diagnosing. The …
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MedSpring Urgent Care was the victim of a data breach thanks to a phishing scam recently, possibly exposing the health information of some 13,000 patients. It started when a single employee fell prey to phishing—something that wasn’t discovered for a week and half, during which time the patient records were exposed. Once it discovered the breach, MedSpring blocked the unauthorized party’s access to the email account and brought in a cybersecurity vendor to figure out …
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As pain clinics come under closer scrutiny amid efforts to stem the tide of opiate addiction across the country, patients who need (and those who are addicted to) prescription pain medications are looking for new avenues of securing drugs. In Tennessee, where two-thirds of pain clinics have been shut down, there’s concern that tens of thousands of patients will be knocking on the doors of community health resources to get new prescriptions—or, worse, turning to …
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Often, managers and staff alike approach the performance appraisal process with a sense of dread. It shouldn’t be just busy work or a method of justifying why an employee deserves (or doesn’t deserve) a raise, however. Properly implemented, performance appraisals can help an urgent care operation build a top-flite workforce. If you have no earthly idea how that’s possible, you may want to register for the Urgent Care Association’s next webinar on Thursday, August 16, …
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