Practice Management
Uncommonly high temperatures this summer have led increasing numbers of patients to seek care for heat-related conditions at hospitals and urgent care centers across the country. Even in Florida, where people are prepared for extreme heat, emergency room and urgent care operators say they’re seeing more patients with symptoms of heat stroke, heat exhaustion, and other conditions than in recent years. According to a report from WUSF Public Media in Orlando, urgent care centers in …
Read More
Offering information on various disease states, seasonal health concerns, and public health initiatives on your website is a great way to build engagement and establish a reputation as a trustworthy partner in patients’ wellbeing. Relying on technology to populate webpages with that information can be a great timesaver and help keep costs down—as long as that technology doesn’t run amok, as it apparently did recently on the website of a New York City urgent care …
Read More
Numerous companies that have been hugely successful in various aspects of the retail business keep trying to get a foothold in healthcare. The most notorious example would probably be Walmart, which has launched unsuccessful ventures in both the brick-and-mortar and virtual spaces. The latter is now of greater interest than ever to Amazon Clinic, which launched in November 2022 but just recently became accessible to patients in every U.S. state. This initiative may have a …
Read More
The midpoint of summer saw the steepest increase on COVID-19 since December 2022, leading some public health authorities and academics to wonder aloud whether we could see another tripledemic—simultaneous, high rates of COVID, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus—as winter approaches. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hospitalizations for COVID-19 jumped 10.3% in the week ending July 15. Emergency room visits were also up for the week ending July 21. Given …
Read More
Nurse practitioners and physician assistants—or, collectively, advanced-practice providers (APPs)—have been essential members of the urgent care clinical team for years. Their presence on the payroll enables urgent care operators to offer high-quality care to more patients on a daily basis than would be possible without them, or with an all-physician team. Now it seems even more healthcare employers are waking up to the benefits of working with APPs. According to new data from the U.S. …
Read More
When hackers launched a cyberattack against Prospect Medical Holdings in Los Angeles, the ripples were felt from coast to coast and ultimately forced cessation of urgent care operations temporarily. As reported by CBS News Moneywatch, even some who escaped a total shut down found themselves working without the benefits of computers for a time, as Crozer-Chester Medical System in Springfield, PA reverted to using hard copies for necessary documentation and records. That was expected to …
Read More
Too many patients take too many antibiotics over the course of their lifetimes, often beginning from a very young age. Given the too-high incidence of multidrug resistance, this seems beyond debate. While education campaigns by the Urgent Care Association and many other provider bodies have been helpful in raising awareness, clinical evidence to help guide decision-making has been relatively sparse. One new study published by The Journal of the American Medical Association could be helpful …
Read More
Not long ago, JUCM published an article (The X-Waiver Is No More: What This Means for Urgent Care) analyzing how removal of federal caps on prescribing buprenorphine—in effect, paving the way for any provider with a standard DEA controlled-medication license to prescribe—would impact the urgent care industry. On the heels of that, a new study published by JAMA Health Forum assessed the differences between providers who received Drug Addiction Treatment Act (DATA) waivers under the …
Read More
Walmart’s various forays into the healthcare space have fallen short of economic viability over a number of years. As such, it may be surprising that healthcare researchers and business schools haven’t devoted more attention to assessing why that is, or why the company continues to expend capital without much of a return to show. Finally, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business has taken a stab at it in an article published in the …
Read More
While a rise in leprosy cases in Florida is concerning enough, providers and public health officials there are especially alarmed because so many cases are occurring in patients with less-than-traditional risk factors and in patients born in the United States. According to a post by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, both those factors “contribute to rising evidence that leprosy has become endemic in the southeastern United States.” Consequently, the CDC advises providers to …
Read More