Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

The Threat of Burnout Keeps Climbing in Urgent Care—and Not Just Among the Clinical Team

It’s been well-documented that the COVID-19 pandemic has been hard on clinicians, to the point that burnout is affecting more physicians, nurses, and advanced practice providers than ever. A viewpoint piece just published by the Journal of the American Medical Association draws back the curtain on another portion of your workforce whose own stresses over the past couple of years. Considering increased turnover among all healthcare workers between April and December 2020 and drawing on …

It’s Time to Revisit the Effect of Wait Times on Patient Satisfaction

As urgent care continues its resurgence from a couple of years in which patient volumes were precariously low and the healthcare landscape in general was turned upside down, it may be wise to remember what patients came to value about this setting in the first. Key among the attributes, historically, has been convenience. FIERCE Healthcare just published an article connecting the dots between wait times for medical care and patient satisfaction. The worst-case scenario cited …

As More Data Come to Light, Recommendations Concerning COVID Patient Isolation Get Murkier

Per the latest recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people who’ve experienced symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection can stop isolating after 5 days, provided that they’ve been fever-free for 24 hours without taking fever-reducing medication and their symptoms have improved. People who’ve tested positive but experienced no symptoms can stop isolating after day 5 without conditions. New data just published by JAMA Network Open lean in the other direction, however. In a small (N=40) …

Monkeypox Is Now a U.S. Public Health Emergency

The federal government followed in the footsteps of the World Health Organization in officially declaring the ongoing monkeypox outbreak to be a public health emergency. In addition to qualifying the level of threat perceived due to the virus, the move will make deeper resources aimed at containing the outbreak available at multiple levels throughout the U.S. health system. Federal agencies are now authorized to fund development of and access to vaccines and therapies to fight …

CVS May Try Buying Its Way into the Primary Care Business Barely a week after we told you that Amazon plans to try its hand at providing healthcare services in the brick-and-mortar world by buying One Medical, CVS announced that it, too is taking another run at expanding its own menu of healthcare offerings. The company says it’s looking at possible primary care acquisition targets, with an eye toward buying them outright or simply taking …

Congress Opens the Door to Extend Reimbursement for Telehealth Services

Urgent care operators who offer telehealth services should be aware that the House of Representatives just passed the Advancing Telehealth Beyond COVID-19 Act. As the name implies, the legislation extends policies initiated to help facilitate access to healthcare as many patients shied away from face-to-face encounters in medical facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Among those most applicable in the urgent care setting: Beneficiaries who fall under the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services can receive …

Be Aware: Some Urgent Care Workers May Be Getting $25 an Hour Soon

While it’s a bit unclear exactly whom it applies to at this point, Los Angeles just passed an ordinance mandating that workers at “certain private healthcare facilities” earn a minimum wage of $25 an hour. The question is which facilities that label will apply to in the eyes of the city. Some of them are straightforward in the language of the ordinance—licensed acute psychiatric hospital as defined in Section 1250(b) of the California Health and …

Patients May Have Heard Paxlovid Increases Risk for Rebound COVID. Data Suggest Otherwise

One of the knocks against using nirmatrelvir-ritonavir (Paxlovid) to treat patients with SARS-CoV-2 has been that it could send patients running to the emergency room, and possibly face hospitalization, for rebound COVID-19. It’s enough to discourage some people from taking it, even if they’re high risk for poor outcomes with COVID. According to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, however, those patients should be more concerned about the consequences of not …

Poor Adherence to Follow-Up and Vaccination Schedules? Well-Timed Reminders Work Wonders

For most urgent care visits, the ball is in the patient’s hand. They feel sick and can’t wait for their primary care physician or in the emergency room, so they head to your location. There are times when the urgent care operator may want to reverse roles, though, and get in touch with patients, such as to remind them it’s time for a vaccination. According to research just published by JAMA Network Open, texting has …

A Chicago Urgent Care Center Just Got Hit with a Data Breach. Take Steps to Lower Your Risk

A Chicago urgent care operator is the latest healthcare facility to be the target of a data breach with the potential to expose the healthcare records and other sensitive information of more than a hundred thousand patients. It’s believed that the breach, which is thought to have occurred over several days in May, was the result of hackers intentionally trying to access the system. While the potential consequences of that to patients are obvious, don’t …