‘Test to Treat’ COVID-19 Plans May Bear Some Clarification When It Comes to Urgent Care

If you watched President Biden’s State of the Union speech, you probably took note of changes planned for the “test to treat” initiative, in which patients can visit specified clinics to receive a COVID-19 test and then immediate treatment if warranted. Though the president called out pharmacy-based clinics as a specific example of such locations, the Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) has since clarified that urgent care centers who meet the relevant criteria may also qualify to participate. With approximately 600,000 doses of oral therapeutics scheduled for allocation in the coming weeks, and more to come, now is the time to decide if your operation should be among them. The Urgent Care Association devised a survey to get a sense of how the urgent care industry is likely to respond. If you’d like the results to reflect your view, click here to access the survey. Test to Treat might raise concerns that that some in the urgent care industry (and others, undoubtedly) have voiced over the years, concerning tasking pharmacists who are already overworked with diagnosing and prescribing medications on the spot. JUCM has covered that issue in numerous articles. Two that might provide good insights into that topic are Pharmacists with Prescribing Privileges: A New Class of Medical Practitioner and Prescribing Pharmacists: Cheaper and More Accessible Than Urgent Care?