Practice Management
Urgent Message: When offered as a medical service consistent with an urgent care center’s branding, IV infusion services can enable new revenue streams and expand the center’s appeal to a new base of patients. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc According to the Urgent Care Association (UCA), the capability to administer intravenous (IV) medications is a defining feature of urgent care.1 Along with x-ray services and suturing, the availability of IV treatment differentiates urgent care from …
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Alan A. Ayers, MBA, Macc Urgent Message: Urgent care is a consumer-driven phenomenon, and physician entrepreneurs continue to evolve the delivery of urgent care services in response to changing consumer preferences, both inside and beyond the brick-and-mortar facility. Citation: Ayers A. Thinking outside the box to bring urgent care to the patient. J Urgent Care Med. 2024;18(4): 31-33. While unregulated by most states, the term “urgent care” historically has come to mean a base offering …
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Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Urgent Message: Whether an urgent care center should be open 365 days per year or close on major or minor holidays depends upon factors that influence profitability such as patient demand, competitive positioning, staff availability, payer reimbursement, and the branding impact of after-hours accessibility. As urgent care operators look to the coming holiday season and begin their strategic planning for the new year, many are faced with the question of …
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Urgent Message: As a rising percentage of jurisdictions require disclosure of salary ranges to current and/or prospective employees, urgent care leaders must achieve compliance with pay transparency laws. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc California, New York, Washington, and Rhode Island are among the latest states to add salary range transparency laws to their books.[1] As of this writing, eight states have enacted such laws, with at least 15 more considering legislation on this topic, including Illinois, …
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Urgent Message: Employer worksite clinics represent both a threat and an opportunity. Urgent care could lose some volume to no-cost care at work, but new business evolutions include partnering with local employers to develop onsite care models. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc is President of Experity Consulting and Senior Editor of The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine. Patients today have more options for where they receive care than ever before, which means more competition for …
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Urgent message: By leveraging grant funding, community-facing services, and a collaborative model with school districts, QUICKmed Urgent Care operates a successful school-based health center model. This innovative approach addresses healthcare gaps in underserved areas and augments the operator’s core business. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Click Here to download the article PDF QUICKmed Urgent Care, based in Youngstown, OH, is a prominent provider in the state’s Northeast region. Its 12 traditional urgent care centers are …
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The makeup of the urgent care industry has changed considerably since its inception in the 1970s. At the time, it was a radical idea to see patients with nonemergent complaints on a walk-in basis. Certainly hospitals wanted no part of it; that’s what they had emergency rooms for. Rather, the UC industry’s founders tended to be in private or small group practices, but unsatisfied with how they were practicing. Over the decades that followed, it …
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Click Here to download the article PDF Urgent message: Food, drug, and mass retailers continue to explore the healthcare space and seek profitable ways to leverage their massive footprints. As they shift their strategies in favor of primary care, especially for Medicare populations, they are relinquishing control of the transactional health market to urgent care. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc is President of Experity Consulting and is Senior Editor of The Journal of Urgent Care …
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Click Here to download the article PDF If urgent care had a family tree, it would show an ancestry rich in physicians with a pioneer spirit—individuals who wanted to find a way of practicing medicine that they believed to be more sensible, efficient, and economical while still offering excellent clinical care. Based on the decades that followed, up through today and beyond it’s safe to say the “experiment” has been an unqualified success.This is not …
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Click Here to download the PDF. Urgent message: In December 2022, Congress passed the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment Act (W-Waiver), which would remove federal patient caps and allow any healthcare provider with a standard DEA controlled-medication license to prescribe buprenorphine. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc is Senior Editor of The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine and President of Experity Consulting. For over a decade, the question of whether or not to prescribe buprenorphine/naloxone (Suboxone) products in urgent …
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