Practice Management
It’s unclear whether human error or ill intent on the part of hackers is to blame, but on July 10 the records of more than 200,000 patients who had visited Premier Immediate Medical Care was exposed was “left exposed” for over a month on a practice management software server. The software provider, MedEvolve, says it is notifying current and former Premier patients that their names, billing addresses, telephone numbers, insurance status, and, for some, Social …
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Concerns over the lifetime consequences of head injuries have led to countless protocols and regulations for athletes and victims of accidents or falls. Advances are being made on the clinical front, too—some of which may light the way for urgent care to play a bigger role. First, a study just published in JAMA Network Open suggests that patients who presented to emergency rooms with what was ultimately found to be mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) …
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It may come as no surprise to urgent care providers who offer occupational medicine services such as drug testing, but the overall rate of positive drug tests remains high across the board in the U.S. workforce according to new data from Quest Diagnostics. While fewer workers are testing positive for opiate use, results indicating use of cocaine, methamphetamine, and marijuana kept the positive test rate at 4.2%. That’s the same as it was in 2016—which …
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Data published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association point to a need for all clinicians to focus on controllable risk factors for disease and mortality. For urgent care clinicians, that may mean being assertive in probing for patient habits that could be contributing factors related to their presenting to you on a given day. The article points out wide differences in the burden of disease from state to state, attributed to key …
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