Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Disaster Strikes—What’s the Plan for Your Urgent Care Center?

Urgent message: Urgent care centers exist to help people who need to see a healthcare professional today. When that need coincides with a natural or manmade disaster, every location must have a plan of action to ensure any downtime is minimal, staff needs are met, and the business is able to survive. Introduction No region of the country—for that matter, no state, town, neighborhood, or block—is immune from disabling disasters. Hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, forest fires, …

Feds Expand Pool of Mandatory Drug Tests for Government Workers

Urgent care operators who offer occupational medicine services should be aware that new guidelines for federal workplaces include mandatory screening for four relatively common opioid pain medications. As of October 1, employee drug tests must include screens for oxycodone, oxymorphone, hydrocodone, and hydromorphone. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) says this will mainly affect some 400,000 federal employees with public health, public safety, and national security responsibilities. Positive results that are not …

Gathering Metrics on Pediatric Urgent Care: Convenient Hours

In this issue of JUCM, we inaugurate a new focus on treating children in the urgent care center. This will manifest in the form of semiregular articles by clinicians who’ve made the commitment to focus on pediatric urgent care. The first, Approach to the Child with Chest Pain, appears on page XX. We are not alone in recognizing that urgent care is ideally suited to the treatment of children whose presenting symptoms don’t warrant a …

Maximize Revenue for Nebulizer Treatments

Q: What can we bill for when we give a patient a nebulizer treatment for an acute airway obstruction during an exacerbation of asthma, or wheezing due to an upper respiratory ailment? A: You can bill for the service and the medication. However, depending on the payer rules, the medication might be bundled into the service. Time is a factor when billing the service. If the treatment is less than 1 hour, you would bill …

Understanding the Ins and Outs of Triple Net Leases

Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc is Vice President of Strategic Initiatives for Practice Velocity, LLC and is Practice Management Editor of The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine. Urgent Message: As urgent care expands into traditional retail space, it’s important to understand the obligations of leases that require tenants to act as property “owners” responsible for all taxes, utilities, and maintenance of the real estate. While the defining characteristic of urgent care facilities across the country …

Why Urgent Care Needs More Controllers, Fewer Empathizers

Urgent message: The rise of self-service technologies means that when patients actually do need to interact with frontline staff to resolve a service issue, their more complicated issues, more stringent demands, and higher expectations require an opinionated and outspoken “controller” personality type to take control of the situation. As urgent care relies on positive of word-of-mouth to drive new and repeat visits, a center not only must deliver an exceptional patient experience, but also resolve …

Come October, Come the Flu

On paper, flu season starts next month, meaning it’s an ideal time to start reminding patients they’ll need flu shots (and that you’ll be happy to provide one). While the majority of children tend to get their shots toward the end of the season according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the distribution has been more evenly distributed for adults over the past few flu seasons, as seen in Figure 1, below. The …

2018 ICD-10-CM: A Preview of Urgent Care-Relevant Changes

It’s again time to review what has changed with the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM) effective October 1, 2017 through September 30, 2018. There are 360 new, 142 deleted, and 226 revised diagnosis codes in the final update. We will review the changes most relevant to urgent care, but the examples shown here are not all-inclusive. You can find all updates in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) website …

Walk-In Primary Care: What Does It Mean for Urgent Care?

Urgent message: As many primary care providers expand their hours and offer walk-in service, the lines between urgent care and primary care become blurred. To remain competitive, urgent care operators will need to more clearly define their value to patient and payers, increase the acuity of services offered to reduce duplication, and become more innovative in their service delivery and partnerships. ALAN A. AYERS, MBA, MAcc Introduction For years, many primary care physicians (PCPs) have …

Streamlining Management of Shared Employees Across Multiple Locations

Urgent message: Ongoing growth within the urgent care industry intensifies competition for competent professionals. “Sharing” trusted workers across multiple sites can help keep costs in check and ensure efficient practices—provided it’s done right. Andraya Carson-Hruby and Vance Daniels It is a good time to be in the urgent care business: According to the Urgent Care Association of America’s 2016 Benchmarking Report, there was a 10% increase in the number of urgent care centers across the …