Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Telehealth Growth Highest in a Trio of Subsegments

As telehealth continues to take root as a viable way to administer care, especially for patients in rural areas, a few subsegments are seeing sharper growth than others. Codes for specialty telehealth (which includes inpatient and outpatient care, ED visits, and postacute care consults) for Medicare beneficiaries were applied 191,000 times in 2015, according to new data from Advisory Board. In addition, the volume of telebehavioral health services provided grew 16-fold between 2012 and 2013, …

More Data Quantify ED Visits That Could Be Avoided

Nonbiased parties outside of the urgent care arena are picking up on the idea that many people who visit the emergency room don’t really need to be there—and there are more data demonstrating that all the time. Most recently, the International Journal for Quality in Health Care published research stating that 3.3% of ED visits are “avoidable” altogether. The data reflect more than 424 million ED visits by patients between 18 and 64 years of …

Opioid Visits Keep Skyrocketing

Driven partially by increased use of the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl, patients continued to flood emergency rooms across the country in increasing numbers over the 10-year period ending in 2014, according to data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ; see graph below). The implications for urgent care are A) that some of those patients surely received their first opioid prescriptions in an urgent care center legitimately for treatment of acute pain, underscoring …

Top Reasons for 2016 ED Visits Show Overlap with Urgent Care Strengths

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates more than 136 million people end up in an emergency room every year in the United States. Of those, 2.1 million are admitted to a critical care unit. Many of the rest could be treated just as well—and much more conveniently and less expensively—in a full-service urgent care center. Consider that the following are among the most common reasons for visits to the ED: Skin infections Cuts …

CDC: One Out of Five Visit a U.S. Emergency Room Every Year

New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal that one out of every five Americans visits a hospital emergency room at least once a year, with California, Florida, Illinois, New York, and Texas accounting for more than a third of all ED visits nationally. The report also reconfirms that most of these patients are adults who are not admitted to the hospital. Of interest to urgent care operators, the national rate for …

Potentially Avoidable ED Visits Cost Over $1.3 Billion—in New York Alone

If just 10 common, low-acuity conditions had been treated somewhere other than the emergency room, the health system in New York could have saved $1.3 billion, according to state Department of Health claims data analyzed by Excellus BlueCross BlueShield. That analysis takes into account 6.4 million ED visits—more than 2 million of which were deemed suitable for treatment in an urgent care center, primary care office, or via telemedicine—for “bumps and bruises,” joint aches, ear …

Study: ACA Fails to Slow ED Visits, But Urgent Care Use Also On the Rise

One of the selling points of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, also known as Obamacare) was that it would save health dollars by diverting newly insured patients away from the emergency room toward primary care physicians. Instead, ED use has continued to grow. The issue, according to Robert Blendon, professor of health policy and political analysis at Harvard’s School of Public Health, is the same as it’s always been, regardless of an individual’s insurance status: …

ACEP: Don’t Blame Physicians if Patient Costs for Out-of-Network ED Visits Go Up

If patients start paying more for visiting out-of-network emergency rooms, the American College of Emergency Physicians suggests it will be the government’s fault, not physicians’ or hospitals’. ACEP joined with the Emergency Department Practice Management Association in crafting a response to a new federal rule that would bar insurers from charging plan members higher copayments when they visit out-of-network EDs. That law does not prohibit doctors and hospitals from “balance billing” consumers if the insurers …

Abstracts in Urgent Care: November, 2010

On ED Visits, Corticosteroids and COPD, Intranasal Steroid in Allergic Rhinitis, Intussusception in Children Under 5, Urinary Antigen Testing, and Emergency Contraception Nahum Kovalski, BSc, MDCM Each month, Dr. Nahum Kovalski reviews a handful of abstracts from, or relevant to, urgent care practices and practitioners. For the full reports, go to the source cited under each title. Emergency Department Visits on the Rise Key point: ED use in the U.S. is up dramatically; these stats …