Practice Management
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 …
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Urgent care operators who face competition from freestanding emergency rooms should emphasize cost differences compared with urgent care, and remind patients that vigilance may be needed to tell the difference between the two. Patients in Texas, for example, are finding that a new law requiring freestanding emergency rooms to post notices that fees may be comparable to a hospital emergency room doesn’t go far enough in preventing surprisingly big bills postcare. One problem: The nature …
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An influx of newly insured patients is just one reason emergency room traffic continues to go up in the age of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or “Obamacare”), according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lack of access to primary care providers in general is especially problematic among Medicaid patients; often, they find access to be untimely, at a median wait time of 2 weeks for an appointment—if a conveniently …
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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 …
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