Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Are Alternative Payment Models Catching On?

There’s little evidence that emerging payment models (eg, concierge medicine, cash-only practices, and accountable care organizations [ACOs]) are gaining any serious traction in urgent care—but that doesn’t mean they’re not making headway elsewhere. ACOs, in particular, are growing in usage among physicians, according to the Medscape Physician Compensation Report 2017. Usage of cash-only and concierge models is also growing, albeit much more modestly, as the graph below shows. Data source: Medscape Physician Compensation Report 2017. …

Optimizing Tax ID Numbers, and Coding for Health Risk Assessments

Q: We are planning to open a new clinic that will offer both primary care and urgent care services. Can we use the same tax identification number (TIN) when we start negotiating contracts with insurance payors? A: Based on our experience with doing this many times, if you attempt to use the same TIN for both primary care (PC) and urgent care (UC), you are likely to see the following results: Some payors are likely …

How to Hire Your Next Urgent Care Manager

Urgent message: Urgent care centers need engaged and effective operations leadership, which entails clearly defining managerial roles, individual skillsets and personality characteristics and also having a process for attracting, interviewing, and qualifying managerial candidates. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc is Vice President of Strategic Initiatives for Experity and is Practice Management Editor of The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine. Jim Clifton, the highly respected CEO of global performance and research leader Gallup, has often stated …

When to Fight a Claim for Unemployment

Urgent message: While unemployment insurance claims can cost an urgent care center through higher future premiums, there are multiple considerations for when a center should contest or approve an unemployment claim. Urgent care centers, as service businesses, frequently experience a high rate of turnover among their less skilled, frontline staff—eg, receptionists, clerks, and medical assistants. Whether an employee quits or is terminated for cause or performance, a common issue for urgent care center owners is …

The Top 10 Mistakes Hospitals Make in the Urgent Care Business

Introduction It should not be surprising that when hospital executives and personnel sit down to discuss issues and problems around population health, accountable care organization (ACO) integration, network development, cost containment, new product lines, hospital readmission rates, care coordination, and related topics they often arrive at hospital-centric and hospital-based solutions to solve them.1 As hospitals and hospital networks look to urgent care centers to address some of these issues through hospital/urgent care affiliations, joint ventures, …

Who Owns Patient Medical Records?

Urgent message: While historically there has been an understanding that patients own the information contained in their medical records, and that providers own the record itself, the current lack of a federal law governing the ownership of medical records poses a conundrum when those records are stored electronically. New challenges demand innovative solutions—often in the form of new technologies that make life easier. Certainly technology has advanced healthcare to improve and lengthen our lives. Yet, …

Demand for Medical Assistants Will Outstrip Supply by 2024

Medical assistants (MAs) are the core of urgent care’s clinical support workforce (as noted in Cost Effective Staffing with Medical Assistants in the January, 2017 edition of JUCM; see https://www.jucm.com/cost-effective-staffing-medical-assistants/). However, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, demand for MAs is expected to outstrip supply over the next decade, just as the aging baby-boom population will increase demand for physician services—especially in the primary care setting, where the bulk of MAs work. For urgent …

Coding for Critical Care Services

Q: Can we bill for critical care services when spending extra time with patients who are very ill? A: It is rare that you would perform billable critical care services in the urgent care setting. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the American Medical Association (AMA), critical care is defined as the direct delivery by a physician(s) of medical care for a critically ill or critically injured patient. A critical …

How Patients Pay Their Bills

Of the survey participants, most (78%) manage billing with in-house staff, while the rest contract for their billing services or use other methods. Such billing efforts cost an average amount of $215.91 per patient—about $3,336,967 per site and $8,876,333 per urgent care center. Small wonder, then, that 14% of respondents cannot yet call their business “profitable.”

Urgent Care Occupational Medicine Efforts Should Focus on the Public Sector

Over two-thirds of urgent care centers offer a blend of occupational medicine services (generally defined as treatment of workers compensation injuries, conducting physicals for compliance or fitness for duty, and substance abuse testing), according to the Urgent Care Association.1 One challenge for those that do is that the overall incidence of workplace injuries has declined significantly this century, due to an overall shift from a manufacturing to a service and information economy, the offshoring/outsourcing of …