Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Can Urgent Care Fill the Child Healthcare Gap?

Data from the National Health Survey show healthcare considered routine by today’s standards is simply inaccessible for some 20.3 million children, in spite of the fact that the number of uninsured children has plummeted by nearly two thirds in the past decades (from 10 million uninsured in 1997 to 3.3 million in 2015). This is most evident in preventive medicine (including immunizations), management of acute and chronic medical conditions, and timely access to subspecialists, according …

Online Searches for ‘Urgent Care’ Keep Growing

Patients looking for immediate care often turn to Google to find it—and over the past 4 years, they’ve typed in “urgent care” before hitting Enter more than ever. Google Trends, which tracks search data, reports that Arizona leads the nation in searches for “urgent care,” with North Dakota having the fewest searches. At the same time, Google Trends reports that searches for the word “hospital” have been in decline for several years. Rising healthcare costs, …

Retail Clinics Don't Help Clear Traffic in the ED

New data published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine definitively show that retail clinics located near hospitals do nothing to reduce the number of visits to the emergency room. Proponents of drugstore, grocery, and “big box store” clinics have suggested in the past that offering walk-in care in a retail setting would keep patients with low-acuity complaints out of the ED, but apparently many patients don’t see it that way. The Annals report focused on …

Urgent Care Centers: Switch to Digital Radiography or Lose Money

Urgent care operators who have adopted digital radiography (DR) will tell you it’s cheaper to maintain, less cumbersome to operate, and overall just more efficient to use than old-school analog x-ray systems. Now you can add Medicare to DR’s proponents—and they’re putting your money where their mouth is. Come 2017, Medicare will start reducing payments for exams performed on analog x-ray systems by 20%. Starting in 2018, urgent care centers using computed radiography (CR) will …

Understanding the Impacts of Health-Care Reform on Urgent Care

Urgent message: Urgent care plays a vital role in reducing medical expenses and improving population health by enabling the right care, at the right place, by the right provider, at the right price. Introduction Health-care reform, quality of care, and costs are center stage topics for politicians and the general public. As medical providers and administrators in the United States, we share in the challenge of understanding this complex system. Whereas traditional approaches in the …

Health Data Management IDs 30 Largest Urgent Care Chains

Urgent care watchers know the industry has been growing at a steady clip for years, with the latest surge fueled by patients and payers eager to get quality care for a fraction of the price of a trip to the emergency room. Some urgent care operators focus more on growth than others, of course. Health Data Management and Merchant Medicine teamed up to identify just which 30 urgent care chains have grown to be the …

Urgent Care Continues to Boost the U.S. Construction Industry

A new survey of hospital construction projects points to the ongoing growth of urgent care as one driver of a construction boom within the healthcare industry. In fact, urgent care, outpatient facilities, and medical specialty complexes are the key contributors to significant increases in new construction. Health Facilities Management’s 2016 Hospital Construction Survey indicated the boom is on track to continue, too; 35% of respondents said they expect to have a medical office project in …

Urgent Care Pushes CMS to Adopt Patient Copays Instead of Coinsurance

The Urgent Care Association (UCA) sent a letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in favor of lowering the copay patients would be responsible for when visiting an urgent care visit, effective in 2018. The changes would affect the cost-sharing structure for “standardized options” (ie, Simple Choice plans) that plan issuers offer in the individual insurance marketplace. Standardized options are intended to simplify the consumer plan selection process; each has a single …

Concussion in the Urgent Care Center: From the Sideline to Your Bottom Line

URGENT MESSAGE: Increased awareness of concussion risks in organized sports creates an opportunity for urgent care centers to offer concussion education and treatment for student-athletes. James Nawalaniec is a first-year medical student at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. Concussions can be difficult to diagnose and easy to ignore, although they pose a very serious threat to brain health and function—especially if more than one concussion is sustained within a short period …

Hospital Network Links Up with Urgent Care Company in Louisiana

LCMC Health, a nonprofit healthcare system that operates hospitals in the New Orleans area, says it’s going to create a network of seven urgent care clinics in the same area starting next spring. Over the course of 18 months, LCMC plans to buy an undetermined number of existing locations and build the rest in new locations. LCMC is working with Baton Rouge-based Premier Health on this project. Premier Health owns 40 urgent care clinics, many …