PAs and NPs Are Seeing Lots of Patients; Make Sure Everyone’s on the Same Page

Physician assistants and nurse practitioners, known collectively as advanced practice providers (APPs), are doing a great job administering care to patients in urgent care centers and other settings all over the country. With the worsening physician shortage, their contributions are going to become more and more essential as time goes on. So, it’s more important than ever to ensure that all the clinicians in your urgent care operation are working in concert with each other. Your facility may have many providers with diverse training, but they should all be adhering to a common ethos when it comes to actually practicing medicine. An article just published online by Medscape underscores the dangers—both to the patient and in terms of legal risk for the practice—of oversights due to breakdowns in communications and uniform standards. A medical practice was sued after a patient with chest pain was discharged home, only to expire there later that night. In that case, an APP determined the patient was not in distress at the time of his visit and recommended he follow up with his cardiologist. She also ordered lab tests—which ultimately showed high troponin levels that the “supervising” physician didn’t see until the next day. Not knowing the patient had died by then, he signed off on the previous day’s visit. The case was settled out of court. The lesson: Every practice needs to have standards that are known to all providers, regardless of their clinical designation, and that include both a unified clinical approach and communication processes that make it easy for everyone to be on the same page in real time.