Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Be Alert: More Patients May Have Alcohol-Use Disorders Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic

It’s become something of a good-natured joke that the COVID-19 pandemic normalized day drinking and virtual happy hours among coworkers and “mommy groups.” The consequences of increased alcohol consumption during lockdowns are just becoming known, however, and they’re no laughing matter. Authors of an article just published by JAMA Network collected data from more than a dozen studies, arriving at the conclusion that between 20% and 40% of individuals acknowledged consuming more alcohol during the …

New Data on the COVID-19 Delta Variant Lend Urgency to Boosting Vaccination Efforts

As of July 6, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show that the Delta variant is now the most prevalent form of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States. Given that this variant has ravaged other countries, most notably India at this time, it’s more essential than ever that urgent care providers continue to educate patients on the importance of vaccination against the virus, and the potential for increased immunization rates to save lives and help …

New HHS Rule May Spell Doom for Freestanding Emergency Room Operators

“Surprise bills” would be illegal under an interim final rule issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. For purposes of the proposed rule, surprise bills are viewed as those received from a healthcare facility or individual provider outside the patient’s insurance coverage after the patient has received services from that facility. While this could apply to any such situation (eg, a patient having an otherwise covered surgical procedure may receive a separate …

Independent Physicians, Once the Backbone of Urgent Care, Are Now a Dwindling Minority

In urgent care’s infancy, the stereotypical operator was an independent (some might even say maverick) physician who was dissatisfied with the traditional way of practicing medicine. Not seeing acceptable alternatives, he or she might get some resources together and open their own urgent care center, essentially becoming owner-operators. Over the years, however, as JUCM readers know, hospital systems and venture capitalists recognized they were missing out on a good thing and started buying or launching …

Not Sure You’re Up to Date on Cybersecurity? You’d Better Figure It Out Before Hackers Do

It’s debatable whether it’s safer to keep all your sensitive data in one large system (thereby putting it all at risk in the event of a single breach) vs maintaining a cluster of smaller systems (in which case the risk is multiplied, but the loss of data might not be so great). The answer could depend on the size and scope of your operation, so in many cases it makes sense to engage a cybersecurity …

Accepting the Presenting Complaint as the Whole Story Could Doom Your Patient and Land You in Court

The operator of a Missouri urgent care center was at the center of a tragic story in which a 1-year-old patient died—with that operator found culpable in the ensuing lawsuit and ordered to pay a $1.8 million judgment. (The jury had originally ordered the company to pay $3 million, which exceeds the state cap on malpractice suits.) The boy’s parents first brought him to a primary care clinic with symptoms attributed to pneumonia. Months later, …

Can You Maintain Staff Excellence in a Chaotic Job Market—with Disincentives to Seek Employment?

Robust unemployment benefits may be easing the burden for people who can’t find suitable work, but they’re also having the unintended consequence of making it (maybe too) comfortable for the unemployed to stay that way. Would-be candidates are even applying for jobs they have no intention of interviewing for in order to show that they’re engaged in a “bona fide job search” in compliance with requirements to maintain unemployment benefits. The effect is being felt …

One Stark Way to Assess the Impact of COVID-19 Vaccination: Most New Deaths and Hospitalizations Are in the Unvaccinated

If clinical trials and scientific data are not enough to convince every American to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, maybe a sobering new report from the Associated Press will do the trick. In short, after crunching data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the AP concluded that most new COVID-19 deaths occur in people who are not vaccinated. In May, only around 150 of the 18,000 Americans (0.8%) who died were fully vaccinated. Similarly, …

UCA Reminds Medical Societies: Urgent Care Is Fully Up to the Task at Hand

The American Hospital Association, the American College of Emergency Physicians, and the American Medical Association recently threw some serious shade at the urgent care industry. The AHA and ACEP took aim at UnitedHealthcare’s plans to review all emergency room visits among its members to assess whether they were “real” emergencies or not, and to force patients to foot the bill if it’s determined that a visit to the ED was actually nonemergent. The problem is, …

Heavy Menstrual Bleeding: Important Considerations for Adolescent Patients in the Urgent Care Setting

Urgent message: Anovulatory cycles are the most common cause of heavy menstrual bleeding (HMB) in adolescent patients. Just as with adult patients in the urgent care setting, it is most important to identify unstable patients and those with life-threatening causes for HMB. Shikha Nigam, MD, MPH and Amy Pattishall, MD Case Presentation A 14-year-old female presents with 6 weeks of menstrual bleeding. Her cycles are irregular but she generally has 4 to 6 weeks of …