Practice Management
Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc is Chief Executive Officer at Velocity Urgent Care and is Practice Management Editor of The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine. Urgent message: A business plan should never be a formality to meet bank or investor requirements. Rather, it should represent a rigorous testing of all your analyses and assumptions around a business decision. Because, sometimes, the “best” outcome from diligent business planning just might be the decision to forego the opportunity …
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Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc is Chief Executive Officer of Velocity Urgent Care and is Practice Management Editor of The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine. Urgent message: As the country’s urgent care markets become increasingly saturated, the forward-thinking operator will have a strategic patient-retention strategy ready when a competitor inevitably opens up shop in their community. As the urgent care market continues its yearly growth of around 8%, per the Urgent Care Association’s 2018 Benchmarking …
Read MoreIf you haven’t noticed, it’s flu season. In fact, it’s been flu season longer than usual for this point compared with past years, thanks to an unexpectedly early arrival. With months to go, though, there’s still time for patients who have not been immunized to reap the benefits of getting a flu shot. This is not to say that influenza is the only immunization patients need. With reports of measles also beginning to climb as …
Read MoreAlan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc is Chief Executive Officer of Velocity Urgent Care and is Practice Management Editor of The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine. Urgent message: Expedited Partner Therapy enables a provider, when treating a patient for a sexually transmitted infection, to give a second prescription for the patient’s partner without having to examine the partner. Introduction Expedited Partner Therapy (EPT) is the clinical practice of treating the sex partners of patients diagnosed with …
Read MoreOn November 1, 2019, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) confirmed with the final rule for 2020 that they have accepted all of the American Medical Associations (AMA) recommendations for coding of office and outpatient evaluation and management (E/M) services starting in 2021. This will offer some documentation relief for providers who have been held to dated 1995 and 1997 guidelines that were written before the use of electronic medical records. However, these …
Read MoreFlu Season is Nearly Synonymous with Rapid Test Season—Are You Ready? Patients come to urgent care because they know they can get excellent care without an appointment, and without languishing in the waiting area of the ED. So, it stands to reason that if they need lab tests they want to get them on site, at your facility, with the same degree of efficiency that drew them in to begin with. This is never truer …
Read MoreUrgent message: Due to the perceived “acute nature” of the urgent care setting, many patients falsely believe that they can be treated anonymously. On the contrary, legal implications, insurance practices, and the integration of technology with medical records mean that delivering anonymous care is nearly impossible. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc is Chief Executive Officer of Velocity Urgent Care and is Practice Management Editor of The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine. Healthcare is intensely personal, …
Read MoreOver the last decade, perhaps the most staggering shift in consumer-based healthcare has been the increase in patient responsibility. Due to the rise in high-deductible health plans (HDHPs), providers are now faced with the challenge of collecting an average of 35% of their revenue from patients, without a downward swing in the insured population. Consider the following: In 2018, 85% of covered workers had a deductible, up from 59% in 2008. The average deductible in …
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Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc is Chief Executive Officer of Velocity Urgent Care and is Practice Management Editor of The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine. Urgent message: Given the oversaturation and resulting fierce competition among urgent care chains in the affluent suburbs of major cities, the underserved rural healthcare market offers tremendous growth opportunity for the forward-thinking urgent care operator. Urgent care began as a suburban phenomenon—and continues to be, as evidenced by the Urgent …
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Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc is Practice Management Editor of The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine and is Chief Executive Officer of Velocity Urgent Care. Urgent message: While any urgent care’s preferred “toilet bluing” method for urine specimen drug screen collects would seem a mundane matter, a careless or haphazard approach can result in unintended and potentially serious consequences. Urgent care centers that provide occupational medicine and drug testing services are required to follow specific …
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