Pediatric Urgent Care

As parents and school districts wrestle with the safest way to begin the school year in light of COVID-19, public health officials are bracing themselves for the day flu season starts to overlap with the pandemic. So, news that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects new cases of acute flaccid myelitis to start mounting soon is concerning, to say the least. The CDC issued a warning that “2020 will be another peak year …

A not-yet-finalized study of COVID-19 contact tracing in South Korea indicates that children under the age of 9 have the lowest virus transmissibility rate among all age groups. While that’s good news in considering the risk to the youngest children and their close contacts, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, points out that the converse conclusion—that children 10 and up are fully capable of transmitting the disease—could spell …

It’s taken a while for data to catch up with the potential harm that could await children who contract COVID-19, but it’s becoming clearer that children who become severely ill with the virus may have certain things in common with kids who have better-understood conditions. Urgent care providers should be wary of assuming that similarities in presenting characteristics equate to similar trajectories ahead, however. A new study just published by the Journal of the American …

A team of researchers who sought to understand what insights could be gleaned from studying emergency room utilization measures wound up revealing data that could be useful for urgent care operators seeking to bolster their pediatric services. A study just published in The American Journal of Managed Care considered whether ED visit count and ED reliance could be used to identify clinically or demographically different populations of children. Of interest to urgent care operators is …

Data from a new study by UnitedHealth Group show that urgent care centers could be providing care for millions of American children who have limited access to well-child visits. Looking at the care of plan members between the ages of 3 and 18 in West Virginia, they found that only one out of three children received an annual well-child visit—with the shortfall being especially dramatic among Medicaid-covered families, children of color, and in rural areas. …

We recently reported data indicating that the public in general is declining preventive care, and even going to the doctor when they have relatively minor complaints. Now an article published in JAMA Network Open reveals that children enrolled in Medicaid may be falling behind on recommended vaccination schedules out of fears that it isn’t safe to visit the pediatrician’s office. It’s likely, then, that children covered by every type of health plan are missing out …

Regular readers of JUCM and JUCM News know pediatric urgent care is a growing segment of our industry. However, as has been the case with urgent care in general historically, data on practice norms are scarce. Penn State University is working to help remedy that by conducting a survey about urgent care centers’ capability to treat children. Questions seek information on availability of nearby emergency room and children’s hospital care, the level of training in …

While acknowledging that traditional primary care settings, including pediatric practices, remain “the foundation of pediatric care,” a new study published in JAMA Pediatrics reveals that a growing number of parents in the U.S. are choosing urgent care and other acute care settings instead of their pediatrician’s office when their children are sick. After looking at more than 71 million pediatric primary care visits by commercially insured children between 2008 and 2016, the researchers reported that …