Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

The Holiday Rush Isn’t Over for Urgent Care

The retail frenzy may subside once Christmas Day is past, but spikes in holiday traffic continue for immediate care providers. Emergency rooms and urgent care centers see their busiest days of the year during the end-of-year holidays, traditionally. Whether it’s food poisoning or carving injuries that present the day after Thanksgiving, broken bones sustained while hanging Christmas lights, or various injuries associated with over-celebrating the New Year, EDs around the country report their visits increase …

New Data Reveal ED Spending Rose 85% Between 2009 and 2015

Emergency department spending jumped 85% over a 7-year period ending in 2015, according to new research by the Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI), even though ED use remained relatively stable. The reason for the increase in spending, according to the report, is that hospitals coded and charged more for high-severity cases during that timeframe. Drawing on charges associated with more than 70 million ED bills, HCCI found that visits billed to CPT codes 99285 and …

Is Uber an Option for Transporting Patients from Crowded EDs to Urgent Care?

Trying to relocate nonemergent patients from overcrowded emergency rooms to clinics and urgent care centers by ambulance led to out-of-control costs in the San Diego area. In addition, it’s been shown that some 30% of people who call 911 for an ambulance didn’t even need emergent care to begin with. So, health officials hit on the idea of calling a taxi or an Uber to take patients where they need to be. The question is, …

Spokane VA Opts to Expand Urgent Care Hours Instead of Reopening ED

Plans to reopen an emergency room that closed in 2014 have been scrapped in favor of expanding the hours of a nearby urgent care center in Spokane, WA. Administrators at the Mann-Grandstaff Veterans Affairs Medical Center haven’t hired enough physicians to staff the ED, so rather than delay further or try to get by on insufficient staffing, the plan is to keep the urgent care center open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. …

Can Hospitals Find Salvation by Offering Primary Care in the ED?

Hospitals and health systems have been taking a hard look at how they can maintain financial stability in recent years. As you’ve read here, many are venturing into urgent care, both on and off campus. Now, some are taking another step toward becoming everyday community health providers by offering, essentially, primary care in their emergency rooms. An article in Modern Healthcare details how one of them, Carolinas Healthcare System, realized the same old way of …

Urgent Care Growth is a Good News/Bad News Scenario for Hospitals

Health system administrators and fans of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or “Obamacare”) have been lauding the fact that employment in the healthcare industry has been climbing since the ACA was implemented. While that may be factually correct in terms of overall numbers, it is also true that health systems have been cutting jobs strategically in order to cut payroll expenses. Not too long ago, Becker’s Hospital Review identified 48 layoffs that have taken place …

Follow-up: AMA Cries Foul over New Anthem ED Policy

We’ve told you recently about plans some insurers have to stick patients with the bill for emergency room visits that are retrospectively determined to have been nonemergent in nature. In essence, if patients go to the ED with an illness or injury that could have been handled in a lower-acuity setting (such as an urgent care center), as determined by the insurer, the patient’s claim will be denied. Now the American Medical Association is demanding …

Most Kids in Anaphylaxis Have No Treatment Before Presenting to Urgent Care or ED

Barely more than a third of children brought to an urgent care center or emergency room with anaphylaxis have received epinephrine before arriving, according to a new study published in the Annals of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology. According to the report, which reflects the cases of 408 children with an average age of 7.25 years, just 36% of the patients had received epinephrine before reporting to an urgent care center or ED. The odds were …

Cigna Moves to Keep Members Away from Urgent Care

Cigna is collaborating with CVS Health to push members into retail clinics instead of visiting urgent care centers when they have immediate, nonemergent medical needs. The company claims that around 45% of urgent care visits could be handled in drugstore clinics—at a savings of 81% per visit for Cigna. The problem? Cigna’s data highlight the minority of patients seeking care. The majority (55%) could not be treated sufficiently in the retail setting, meaning they’d end …

Data Confirm that Urgent Care Can Keep Cancer Patients Out of the ED

The University of Colorado Cancer Center in Aurora, CO has quantified just how much urgent care can contribute to the overall health of patients with cancer—and it’s considerable. The Clinical Assessment and Rapid Evaluation (CARE) Clinic within the cancer center helped keep 21% of cancer patients out of the emergency room, generating over $176,000 in revenue over a period of 7 months. There’s no telling how many potentially serious complications were prevented by saving immunocompromised …