Q: I plan to hire physician assistants and other nonphysician providers in my urgent care clinic. I understand that I can use “incident to” billing to have their patient visits reimbursed at the physician rate. What are the rules for “incident-to” billing? A: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) defines “incident to” as “those services that are furnished incident to physician professional services in the physician’s office (whether located in a separate office …
Read MoreThe Importance and Validity of Nondisclosure and Nonsolicitation Clauses for Urgent Care Center Owners
Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc is Chief Executive Officer of Velocity Urgent Care, LLC and is Practice Management Editor of The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine. Urgent message: Nondisclosure and nonsolicitation clauses are necessary to protect an urgent care center from providers and staff utilizing information gained in their employment in ways that may be damaging to the business, but to be effective, their restrictions and limitations must be understood. Businesses frequently rely upon important …
Read MoreA Snapshot of Flu Vaccination Rates
The ongoing 2017–18 flu season is already one of the worst in recent memory. Recently released data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may offer a clue as to one reason: Based on a complete study of the 2016–17 season, the CDC conjectures that influenza immunization rates may have plateaued. During that most recently completed season, just 46.8% of patients age 6 months or older got a flu shot—an increase of just 1.2% …
Read More
Turning Patient Accounts Over to a Collection Agency—the Right Way
Q: Should patient accounts ever get turned over to a collection agency? A: The altruistic nature of running an urgent care center—to serve the public—can make it difficult to send patient accounts to collection, but it must be done if you want your center to survive. Some urgent care centers choose to leave patient balances in their billing systems indefinitely, but this puts a serious burden on the business by creating additional statement costs, wreaking …
Read More
The Case for an Interprofessional, Postgraduate NP/PA Fellowship in Urgent Care
Christina Gardner, DHSc, MBA, PA-C; Alexandra Nassif, PA-C; Connie Brooks, MSN-FNP; and Kim Roe, MBA, RRT Urgent message: Postgraduate fellowship programs are essential to the development of highly trained providers who can support the ongoing growth of the urgent care marketplace in the midst of a national physician shortage. However, historically there have been view available to nurse practitioners and physician assistants. Introduction A 2017 report of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), predicted …
Read MoreMisunderstanding Occupational Medicine Services ‘Protocols’
Misunderstanding Occupational Medicine Services ‘Protocols’ 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: Urgent care owners should be aware of the misuse of the term “protocol” and the scope of employers’ directions concerning the processing of employees in their centers. In addition, urgent care owners need to be diligent when they believe that one of their …
Read MoreFocusing on the Growth—and Healthcare Savings—of Urgent Care
We all know urgent care has been growing steadily, nearly since its inception. Hard data on the size of the marketplace can be hard to come by, though, as different sources apply varying definitions of what exactly constitutes an urgent care center. Similarly, we know proper utilization of urgent care services has tremendous potential to lower healthcare costs compared with visits to the emergency room. Again, though, the details can be hard to put a …
Read More
Successful Site Selection in Urgent Care
Urgent message: As a retail delivery channel for healthcare, success in urgent care depends on successfully executing the “retail” elements of the urgent care delivery model—the first of which is “location.” 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 care differs from other types of medicine in that it adheres to a retail delivery model; successful urgent …
Read MoreThe Complementary Nature of Occupational Medicine and Urgent Care
As detailed in the first entry of our new occupational medicine series (Foundation of Occupational Medicine in the Urgent Care Setting, page 30), urgent care centers that offer occupational medicine services have reported the dual offerings are complementary in a way that helps balance the patient census and increase revenue. The data here, supplied by Dr. Max Lebow and reflecting Reliant Immediate Care in Los Angeles, illustrate that occ med visits tend to pick up …
Read MoreLaw Enforcement and Healthcare: When Consent, Privacy, and Safety Collide
Urgent message: Urgent care providers are likely to encounter law enforcement officers in the workplace at some point—and to be asked to comply with requests that may or may not violate a patient’s right to privacy, or compromise the urgent care center’s compliance with federal or state law or medical ethics. Understanding your legal rights and responsibilities is essential to fulfilling your obligations to both the patient and the law. Suzanne Cate Jones and Anne …
Read More